Turn off Tooltip windows in Safari

Some Safari users have found it irritating when the application displays small yellow boxes over some links and other web content when the mouse is hovered over the objects.

Apple Discussions poster Joe Mahma writes:

"How I can shut off the yellow text box that pops up when I stop the curser on a hyperlink?"

These yellow boxes are "tooltips", which are information windows that contain a small bit of information pertaining to the object being targeted, such as the link URL or the name of the item. These boxes are on by default in Safari, and unfortunately there is no built-in way to turn them off.

While they can be useful, the timing for these tooltips can have them interfere with web content as users browse. As such, while some users may wish to turn off the tooltips altogether, others might desire to just delay them from appearing a little more than the default.

Fixes

Turn off the tooltips altogether in Safari To turn off the tooltips, users should open the Terminal application and enter the following command:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitShowsURLsInToolTips 0

To reverse this command, enter it again with a "1" at the end instead of the "0".

Change the delay before the tooltips appear For users who wish to not have the tooltips appear right away, they can edit the global tooltips delay preferences. This will affect the tooltips in Safari, but being a global preference it will also affect the delay of tooltips in any cocoa application that supports it. As such it may not be desired for some users who may need tooltips to function in some applications. However, for those who wish to change the delay, enter the following command into the Terminal:

defaults write -g NSInitialToolTipDelay TIME

In this command, the "TIME" component is the number of milliseconds before the tooltip appears. Since this is a global command, it is saved in the global preferences file that is not readily accessible by the user because Apple purposefully hides it to prevent inadvertent deletion or modification. Therefore to turn of the global delay, users must enter the following command in the Terminal:

defaults delete -g NSInitialToolTipDelay

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