Disable cursor hover feature?

You might want to consider starting a new discussion. Since this one is a couple of years old, less people are likely to look at it. A new post would be much more visible. You can link to this one.

Have you checked System Preferences/Accessibility for options?

I am having a problem with my magic mouse seeming to always be active and whenever I hover over any item (an email in outlook, a program icon, an internet link etc...) it opens. I went to the System Preferences and found in the Accessibility tab two items that seem to be the problem - Switch Control and Dwell Control. I think these are the terms the software engineers have used instead of Hover. Even though they are not enabled on my machine, they are being activated somehow and I have to restart my machine to turn them off. I changed the parameters in the settings tab of the Dwell panel as follows: Dwell action: Options Menu : Default Dwell Time: 8 : Home Panel Dwell Time: 8 : Deselect Zoom After : Dwell Movement tolerance: Left unchanged. I think this will minimize the effect of the feature when it randomly occurs and having the options menu action selected will prevent programs from opening erroneously or countless emails or webpages from opening. One last thing I also tried, I switched off my Magic Mouse waited 30 seconds and turned it back on.

This happening to me, too. I was able to stop it on the desktop, though it seems to revert back once in a while on its own. I can't get it to stop on Safari. There doesn't seem to be anything in Preferences that addresses it. Btw, I'm running Mavericks. I refuse to upgrade to the latest system and have to throw away the $1000s I've spent on programs like MS Office, ProTools, Filemaker, Adobe Suite, etc., etc. Hey Apple, how about supporting earlier versions of those programs in your OS?!!! Maybe a virtual OS inside the latest OS (something like you did with "Classic," but smoother)?

Where to send product feedback to Apple:

https://www.apple.com/contact/feedback.htmlf

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201232

What kind of pointing device are you using. Mouse? Trackpad? If it's the trackpad try disabling tap to click in the TP system preferences. It can be a bit "trigger happy" for some folks.

Rereading your first post, for the desktop, my first thought was you are referring to spring-loaded folders which you control with Finder Preferences, General.

Butt hovering over urls in a browser is different. I am not sure what would cause auto selection/click when mousing over unless you have some third-party utility that allows that.

The popup is called a tooltip or help tag. See

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/OnlineHelp/Concepts/To oltips.html for details.

Run this command in the Terminal app to turn them off in Safari:

defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitShowsURLsInToolTips 0

I didn't interpret his description as a tooltip based on statements like "...whatever URL the cursor happens to be over will just open and load".

Do you happen to have any third party mouse utilities installed?

Also, how do things behave in another account or booted in safe mode?

This is happening to us too and driving us crazy. It is happening on a MacBook AND on the iMac and it happens with the apple wireless mouse, with a wired mouse, and with a trackpad. It started doing it once we upgraded to Lion so that has to be the connection. Don't know how to stop it but if we are on a link for more than a second it opens the link.

help

Thanks. I do have a trackpad, and its 'hover-open' tendency was driving me nuts, too. You solved it. I think that option should be clearer in system prefs ...

Exactly what is it that solved your problem? I have it too. Thanks