1. Hysteresis‑delayed tooltips are valued as a subtle UX improvement
- “I ran into the same problem about 20 years ago when implementing hover‑based dropdown menus on a website. It was only about 10 lines of JS and a couple global variables but I was the only person who understood it.” – phyzome
- “Not OP, but my guess is things like timing delay--20 years ago, CSS animations and transitions weren't a thing yet…” – jcranmer
- “If there is a primary UI element on screen… the second element needs an active modifier key to bring it up. Tooltips and such are total trash and get in the way of usability.” – wang_li (highlights the need for intentional delay/modifier)
2. Modern tooltip/hover implementations are often intrusive and frustrating
- “I spend a lot of time seething at how poorly modern software interaction is, and I've come to the belief that they basically solved most of the window‑based GUI computing interactivity problems by around XP, and have just been gutting them since then.” – quacked
- “To me exactly delayed version is annoying. Non‑obvious rules which guide behavior make it feel like there's a bug.” – broken‑kebab
- “Tooltips pop up in many cases where there's no more being used. Tabbing through items, for example.” – forestrywat
3. These patterns are rediscoveries of old solutions, revealing a lack of mature UI frameworks
- “Like the HN post we're commenting on, so too does this example also get regurgitated every few years.” – lelandfe
- “It will never cease to amaze to me that Apple… observed and fixed problems with interactions like this in SYSTEM 6 in like 1993… only for the same problem to have to be re‑discovered and re‑fixed decades later.” – ProxCoques
- “I think the real problem is we don’t have a native‑quality UX toolkit on the web - the built in controls are just horrible. So every app has to reinvent the wheel from scratch…” – nxc18