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Does anyone know if it is possible to control what FireFox puts in the tool-tip windows that are displayed when hovering the pointer over the icons in the bookmarks toolbar? The default content seems to be a combination of the 'Name' and 'Location' fields from the properties dialog for the bookmark.

Ideally, I'd like to make it not display the 'Location' part in the tool-tip, and possibly not even the 'Name', but would really like it to show the properties 'Description'.

The motivation behind this is that I save screen real-estate by clearing the 'Name' field; this eliminates the text that appears to the right of the icons, so I can jam dozens of the things in. The tool-tips help identify an icon when I forget what it stands for, but with Name erased, that leaves only the Location, and those aren't always as obvious as http://superuser.com is. And usually, to preserve the information, when I clear out the Name field, I just paste it into the Description field. Hence the desire to make the tool-tip show the Description text.

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2 Answers 2

If you're concerned about screen real estate, you might look into the Smart Bookmarks Bar Firefox extension.

Smart Bookmarks Bar modifies the bookmarks bar to show bookmarks icons only.

Bookmark names will be displayed on mouse over. This feature can be disactivated if you just want icons without the rollover effect.

Smart Bookmarks Bar Screenshot

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you're probably better off with smart bookmarks than coding it all over again. –  barraponto Dec 1 '09 at 2:14

This Firefox add-on may be of interest: Places' Tooltips

This addon enhances all the tooltips in Firefox.

Shows a tooltip for all links, folders, bookmarks and RSS items on Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmarks Menu', History Menu' and also Sidebars!

You can also see the last visited date, tags, description and the keywords!

For what it's worth, there is a related bug report on Bugzilla@Mozilla.

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