A bug that has plagued the Mozilla Firefox browser for 22 years has finally been resolved. With the release of the upcoming Firefox build 119, the persistent tooltip bug is finally being patched out.
First brought to our attention by Ars Technica, the bug has been present in the underlying code of Firefox since 2002, back when it was known as the Mozilla browser, a much earlier version of the app. That’s right; this bug is so old that it’s older than Firefox itself.
The bug was a tooltip that hung around far too long – indefinitely, in fact. If you were to hover your mouse over a widget in the toolbar of your Firefox browser, a little yellow box would appear, outlining the bookmark’s title, and its URL. If you were then to navigate out of Firefox without moving the mouse, say by pressing ALT + TAB on Windows or Command-tab on Mac, the yellow box would stay on the screen, annoying and persistent until you reopened the Firefox browser and hovered your mouse back over the toolbar button.
But we can now say farewell to this extremely annoying Firefox bug. With version 119 of the browser, a patch has been worked in. The patch was fixed by Firefox contributor Yifan Zhu, who noticed the issue after switching between virtual desktop applications.
“To my horror, I realised this bug report has been open for more than 20 years, and still hasn’t been fixed,” Zhu reportedly told Ars Technica.
Supposedly the issue had been left in for so many years because it was a minor cosmetic issue, and that it wasn’t causing crashes.
There was a lot of celebration among Firefox contributors on Mastodon for the fix, with users rejoicing that Bug 148624 had finally been resolved…. 22 years later. The listing for the bug fix can be read on Mozilla’s Bugzilla website.
Anyway, this one goes out to the Firefox users. I love open-source stuff like this. If you’re a Google Chrome user, you should definitely consider using Firefox.
Image: Firefox logos from 2004 and 2023, Firefox/Gizmodo Australia