Greetings,

I am new to K-Meleon. The past several days I have been seriously learning my way around the browser and overall I am quite pleased.

I have been unable to configure K-Meleon to disable the following tooltip balloon boxes:

1. Tool tips for toolbar buttons. The tooltips were useful for the first few hours of learning K-M, but now that I am familiar with the product I want to disable these tooltips. I realize the messages that appear are extracted from the toolbars.cfg file, but is there a global prefs.js option to disable/ignore all the button tooltips rather than laboriously editing the entire toolbars.cfg file?

2. Tool tips for Advanced Preferences. When I move the mouse throughout the Advanced Preferences dialog box, tooltips appear every time I stop moving the mouse. I do not need these pop-ups and further, the tooltip that appears is always the title of the section I currently am viewing. The tooltips are distracting and annoying. I realize that the Adv. Preferences dialog box is XUL-based and not based upon native Windows libraries and widgets. How do I disable these tooltips?

3. Although useful for many people, I find distracting the tooltip pop-ups for the layer tabs that display the entire URL. How do I disable?

4. I use GNU/Linux as well as Windows. When I visit the Linux Questions Forum (e.g.: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/forumdisplay.php?f=14), I experience tooltip pop-ups when I place my mouse over a thread title to click and select. I never experienced this with Firefox, Opera, or Konqueror. Although probably useful to some people, I find the tooltips disorienting. I also cannot repeat these tooltips at other forums I visit. JavaScript is disabled. I do not know how or why K-M is displaying such tooltips and I would appreciate help in disabling.

Thank you.

1.) AFAIK in toolbars.cfg which is in used skin.

Back {
ID_NAV_BACK
Go back one page # AFAIK = tooltip
toolhot.bmp[0]
toolcold.bmp[0]
tooldead.bmp[0]
}

You could also try a language.cfg that translates English to empty strings.

2.-3. ) not here (my mouse must be defivciant :-) / no idea how.
- but i agree it sounds like the usual windows overkill of help bubbles.

4.) I assume they are in the forum code - like on my home page:

Lake Applets by Sterntaler

tittle="" if You put mouse over a thumbnail - the tittle pops up.
You can try via userContent.css. IF FFox does not do it there try with his.

1 & 3 are not configurable.

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4. ... I never experienced this with Firefox, Opera, or Konqueror. ...

Eh? Then there's something wrong with your Firefox; at least Firefox 2 shows the tooltip. Are you sure it's not some config you have?

2. That was actually due to a mistake of mine. The tooltips are gone in 1.1.

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1 & 3 are not configurable.

Okay, so for the toolbar tooltips I have to laboriously edit the toolbar.cfg file. Doable, but laborious.

I can't stop the tab tooltips from appearing? Another Improvement request coming up!

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Eh? Then there's something wrong with your Firefox; at least Firefox 2 shows the tooltip. Are you sure it's not some config you have?

I'm using 1.5.0.7. Perhaps there is a difference. I only wish I knew what the underlying preference was that causes this. I ran into another forum yesterday that did the same thing I experienced at LQ with the text balloons appearing when I place the mouse over the forum thread title. I find this "feature" terribly disorienting.

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2. That was actually due to a mistake of mine. The tooltips are gone in 1.1.

That's good. Must be XUL related perhaps?

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4.) I assume they are in the forum code - like on my home page:

Okay, with K-M 1.02 I get the text balloons. With Firefox 1.5.0.7 I do not. So is there a user_prefs setting that I should know about?

I hate unfinished forum threads, therefore I am posting some additional information about this problem with tooltips that I am experiencing. After some additional research I understand the problem, but I am still searching for a solution.

In Opera I discovered an option to toggle showing tooltips. I had that option disabled and when I enabled the option, Opera then displayed tooltips when I hovered over certain images and forum thread titles. That explains why previously when I used Opera the tooltips did not appear.

I could find no equivalent toggle in Firefox.

After some more research and with the help of the posts in this thread, I realized that the tooltips are caused by using the "title" element. If any HTML tag contains this element, then a properly designed browser will display the tooltips. Fair enough, I now at least understand why these tooltips appeared in K-M, and now in Opera. But what about Firefox?

A little more surfing revealed that Firefox has long been published with a known bug where the browser fails to display tooltips derived from the title element. Thus, for the past, oh, three or four years that I have been using Firefox, I have been surfing without these tooltips appearing and because of the bug being inherent from the beginning, I never knew that tooltips should appear.

Because I do not like these tooltips popping up, long ago I probably disabled that option in Opera and had since forgotten.

So understand that for the past several years I have been surfing without these tooltips popping up from using the title element. This became the norm for me. With my recent introduction to K-M, and these tooltips "suddenly" appearing everywhere, I thought the problem was with K-M. But the problem actually was that long-standing bug in Firefox that never displayed the tooltips and the manner in which I configured Opera.

Now the irony of this story is that I do not like the tooltips popping up all over the place. I prefer the way in which Firefox worked---no tooltips, despite the cause actually being a bug.

The problem is not K-M---K-M is displaying the tooltips as required by the HTML specs. But after years of using the buggy Firefox, I actually have grown to prefer not displaying the tooltips.

Somebody mentioned I could prevent the display of these tooltips with some code in userContent.css. That seems plausible, but I am not a whiz at this kind of thing and if anybody can provide a few clues, I might be able to eliminate the display of tooltips when I am using K-M. The solution is that I need to be able to filter all "title" elements from any HTML tag.

I truly find these tooltips distracting and annoying. I'd be grateful if anybody can help or provide some links for me to follow so I can modify userContent.css.

Thank you.

Not sure if this is what you want. Since you don't like the things at all, I believe that you can do the following to eliminate these little help balloons by doing the following:

1.Click Start, click Run, type regedit, and then press ENTER.
2.Navigate to the following subkey:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced
3.Right-click the right pane, create a new DWORD value, and then name it EnableBalloonTips.
4.Double-click this new entry, and then give it a hexadecimal value of 0.
5.Quit Registry Editor. Log off Windows, and then log back on.

If you already have an entry EnableBalloonTips in your registry, then set its value to 0.

Peabody,

You may want to search Mozilla documentation or ask in a Mozilla mailing list whether there is a pref that can do this.

Otherwise I can write a little JS code than can be injected to remove all the title attributes.

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EnableBalloonTips...

Made no difference with K-M.

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You may want to search Mozilla documentation or ask in a Mozilla mailing list whether there is a pref that can do this.

There is an abundance of info about why Mozilla browsers do not display tooltips from the "alt" attribute, but I have yet to find a preference about disabling text derived from the title element within a tag. I'll post at mozillazine and see what flies.

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You may want to search Mozilla documentation or ask in a Mozilla mailing list whether there is a pref that can do this.

I discovered that there is a preferences that controls both browser toolbar tooltips as well as inline title element tooltips: browser.chrome.toolbar_tips. I can successfully toggle this preference in Firefox and the tooltips appear/disappear inline or in the program toolbar. This is what I was seeking.

Unfortunately, this preference seems broken in K-M and has no effect. I will post likewise in the bugs forum.

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Otherwise I can write a little JS code than can be injected to remove all the title attributes.

You have posted at least one snippet that has helped me so if you can, please show your wizardry once again! Would userContent.css be the best location?

This should do it.

$JSdoit = "(function () { function delTitle(n) { try { n.removeAttribute('title') } catch (e) { } var ns = n.childNodes; var len = ns.length; for (var i = 0; i < len; i++) delTitle(ns) } delTitle(document) })()"
&hndlDoc;

Add the code to a new macro, then call it from the OnLoad event macro. You can also add it directly to OnLoad, but that's really bad style.

And here's the relevant JS code.

function delTitle(n) {
	try {
		n.removeAttribute('title')
	} catch (e) {
		// do nothing
	}
	var ns = n.childNodes
	var len = ns.length
	for (var i = 0; i < len; i++)
		delTitle(ns)
}
delTitle(document)

There is possibly some limit on the nesting depth that it can handle, but it should be enough for almost all web pages out there.

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Add the code to a new macro, then call it from the OnLoad event macro.

Thanks for helping, but you're writing to a JS illiterate. I have no idea how to implement what you describe. Would you please post a more complete solution, such as the original code found at the K-M macro page? Something that users can copy and paste and be done?

Ah, OK, I thought you already know your way around K-Meleon's macros.

So first you need to add the code to some new macro, let's say "RemoveTitle".

RemoveTitle {
	... ## those two lines ##
}

For a normal macro (like the input-focusing macro from your other thread) you'd want to refer to this from either accel.cfg, menus.cfg, or toolbars.cfg so you can run it using a keyboard shortcut, menu, or toolbar button. However, since you want this to activate automatically everytime you load a page, you have to call it in the OnLoad macro instead.

In macros.cfg, search for OnLoad, and modify it to look like this:

OnLoad {
	... ## some existing content, don't touch ##
	&RemoveTitle;
}

Do not delete the code that is already inside OnLoad. Just add that one line to the end.

Eh, how the heck did I get this to run?! There should be a semicolon at the end of the $JSdoit... line, maybe I deleted it by mistake.

Okay, I grok a little better now. The missing link was that I did not know you were referring to a specific section in macros.cfg called OnLoad.

Initial testing shows the title tags are gone. In typical web forum parlance: woohoo!

Thanks for your help!