Turn off the link hover statusbar in Google Chrome

I want to turn off the feature where whenever I hover over a hyperlink and in the bottom lefthand corner it shows a light blue hover tooltip about where that link goes.

Why do I want to turn it off? It's annoying to me. I am distracted as I work. None of the other browsers do it. Besides, it serves little purpose because it can be spoofed with the onmousedown event on a link. Take for instance ads on Facebook -- those spoof.

I really don't care where a given link goes and wish I could turn that feature off, even if I have to install a Google Chrome Extension.

So, is there a fix to turn the annoying link hover tooltip feature off?

Volomike

Posted 2011-01-29T06:17:45.683

Reputation: 691

@user65803: Yep. E.g. in chat boxes that appear at the bottom of the viewport. My way to handle this is to move the mouse to a place with no link. I think the problem is that you are not always aware of the mouse pointer position, so the popping up of the bar appears arbitrary. But once you pay more attention to the mouse pointer, it feels less problematic. – donquixote – 2015-03-16T16:36:14.097

13Why on Earth would you want to do this? That's one of the best features in my opinion. You don't care where it goes? Suppose someone spoofed the link text and instead it directs to some site that could hurt your computer? – jmort253 – 2011-01-29T07:46:32.267

1you would go to a browser with a dedicated status bar that shows URL in it rather than live with a hover ? o_0 – Sathyajith Bhat – 2011-01-29T08:44:28.623

7For those wondering why you'd want to disable this, a big reason for me is that the tooltip almost always covers up something I want to read on the lines below the link. If I get my mouse near a vertical list of links, a tooltip pops up and I can't read the next few lines. Extremely annoying. – None – 2011-02-02T20:31:18.313

2@Scratch. That's exactly my problem. As a web developer, I sometimes use A hyperlinks for AJAX buttons that aren't necessarily true links. Sometimes the tooltip covers up the button. Sometimes the tooltip appears and gives the impression that the button will make the browser leave the page when indeed it will not. Safari is a webkit browser as well, but they don't have this issue. I wish Google would be flexible and give us an option to toggle this on/off in the HTML code of the page. – Volomike – 2011-02-05T06:09:33.510

And how to turn it on? Turn on the link hover statusbar in Google Chrome?

– hakre – 2013-07-24T08:52:31.693

2Another reason you'd want to remove the status bar: recording a full screen'd video of a browsing session (software tutorial) and you don't want the video junked up with links being displayed in the bottom left corner... – mellodev – 2013-07-30T01:04:30.067

I can't answer on this question, but if you really needed to do this, you could try running Chrome through Chromedriver which has a full screen option that doesn't show the link hover. – bryan kennedy – 2014-02-06T18:02:53.547

Answers

You cannot turn off the status bar.

Most of the time you're not even supposed to see it. It only shows up when it needs to. It's more convenience than security since you can spoof it with JavaScript.

Even if you didn't want it to appear every time you hover over a link, it's one feature that you just can't turn off.

random

Posted 2011-01-29T06:17:45.683

Reputation: 13 363

It's more convenience than security since you can spoof it with JavaScript. Actually, that’s not true anymore; most browsers no longer support window.status specifically to prevent link-spoofing. (It seems like de-coupling the status-bar from the link-target, say with dedicated link-target control, would have been a more ideal solution than simply killing off all access to the status-bar which had legitimately useful possibilities.) – Synetech – 2014-03-01T04:57:54.170

If:

You can control the invocation of Chrome (like I can, because we are using Chrome for the front-end of a custom app)
You want Chrome to be full-screen (like I do)

you can try Chrome's --kiosk command-line option, which appears not to display link href status hovers.

Bill Burdick

Posted 2011-01-29T06:17:45.683

Reputation: 131

On Windows 10 on a second screen (with horizontal task bar on) it hides the status text (gets pushed off the screen).

Was annoying me as I sometimes need to review a link, and suddenly I couldn't see it. If I move Chrome to my primary screen (vertical task bar on) the hover works again.

The Coder

Posted 2011-01-29T06:17:45.683

Reputation: 111