I actually don't even understand what could be perceived bad about them. Are people really moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen without having conscious control of their hand movements? (I understand that this could be true in case of some medical condition like Parkinson's disease but not a general issue at all). Don't want to sound offensive; honest question.
When navigating, I of course pay close attention to where my cursor is. When I scroll to read through lots of text, I'm not moving the mouse cursor randomly around the screen, but I'm also not paying attention to where it is because scrolling up/down behaves the same regardless of where the cursor happens to be. On a site like Wikipedia, this means that my cursor can happen to trigger a preview hover that covers the very text I'm trying to read. Even if it's in a different spot, the movement is enough to be annoyingly distracting and often means I lose my place.
Personally I really like Wikipedia's preview feature. It makes it easy for me to decide if a link is worth following. The German language version does not have it, and whenever I use that one I quickly start to miss it.
I’m not sure which is the more annoying aesthetic:
- mousing across the screen and accidentally passing over an item that on-hovers a giant div in front of what you were trying to access
- expecting a click to expand and click, but it hovers, and now you’ve clicked, so you’re going to some random page you didn’t intend to
Ok, I can go about my weekend now that this is off my chest.
:)