Firefox 153 shipped with plenty of headline features, including native Containers, Windows HDR video support, and new PDF tools. We covered all that good stuff here. One smaller change didn’t get nearly as much attention, even though it fixes a long-standing annoyance for websites.

You know those little tooltips that pop up when you hover over a button? The ones that tell you what an icon does before you click it. For a long time, the web had a weird problem with them. If you had a menu open and then hovered somewhere to see a tooltip, the browser would sometimes just slam your menu shut. Annoying, right? You lose your place and have to start over.

Firefox 153 adds a new type of popup called a “hint” popover that solves exactly this. The short version is that these hint popups can show up without killing whatever menu or panel you already have open. Hover a button, see its tooltip, and your dropdown stays right where it was. As the Firefox team puts it, showing a hint “doesn’t close auto popovers, although showing an auto popover does close hint popovers, which feels right.”

The idea isn’t brand new. An early version of hint popovers actually showed up back in Firefox 149 and Chrome 113, but the team found “a bunch of inconsistencies” in how it worked and went back to fix them. The corrected version is what landed in Firefox 153, with Chrome 151 due to follow shortly after. Safari doesn’t support it yet, though it’s part of the Interop 2026 effort, so it should reach every major browser sometime this year.

You can watch Firefox’s video explanation for a better understanding:

Mozilla’s Firefox team highlighted the feature on X after Firefox 153 rolled out. The announcement even included a light-hearted typo, with the developer joking that they usually misspell “popover” as either “popopver” or “poopover.”

That said, if you’re wondering why you should care if you’re not a web developer? Well, this is one of those behind-the-scenes things that makes the sites you use every day feel less clunky. Menus that don’t randomly close on you. Tooltips that behave. Basically, it takes away an annoyance that you probably didn’t even know was acting as a speed breaker.

It also means developers no longer have to write piles of messy code just to get tooltips and menus to play nice together. The browser handles it now. Fewer hacks usually means fewer bugs down the line for the rest of us.

Firefox 153 has been full of small, easy-to-miss upgrades, like one of the biggest Linux graphics improvements in years and a round of bug fixes on iOS that finally sorted out password saving and screen flickering.

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