Note: This article was completed by AI (Claude Sonnet 4.6) from my initial notes and thoughts.
Twenty-one years, apparently.
This Firefox bug was filed in 2002: on macOS, tooltips would stay visible over other windows even after Firefox moved to the background. A small annoyance. It survived dozens of Firefox versions, accumulated over a dozen duplicate reports, and was finally fixed in Firefox 119 in 2023.
Comment #42 put it well:
"given its longevity, I'm kinda partial to let it be forever. It feels like a relic from the past."
That made me laugh. It also made me think: bugs don't live that long because nobody knows about them. They live that long because they're not painful enough — users learn to work around them, developers get used to them, and quietly they become part of the furniture.
Until someone gets fed up and fixes it.