Thanks again for the tip!

However, there is a long-standing bug in Opera GX that Opera doesn't want to seem to investigate and fix. If you have "Begin with a fresh start page" set at the URL opera://settings/onStartup, when Opera starts up, the page opera://startpageshared will load up at startup. This page causes a bug where after the first time you hover over a link, the tooltip will no longer show. And, sometimes, the first time you hover over a link where the tooltip does show, the tooltip can get stuck on the screen.

This issue can also happen with the startup setting set to "Retain tabs from previous session" if you also have "display start page first" enabled and or if opera://startpageshared was open when you closed Opera. Avoid those and you might be okay.

One way that used to avoid the issue/bug was to set the startup setting at the URL opera://settings/onStartup to "open a specific set of pages", click "add a new page" and add specifically opera://startpage (not opera://startpageshared). You can try that to see if it still works, but I think now Opera redirects to opera://startpageshared which might trigger the bug. You can test though to see if it helps.

So, you might be running into that issue.

Besides that, make sure "Use graphics acceleration when available" is enabled at the URL opera://settings/system and adjust the Angle flag for your GPU that only doesn't help.

Of course, note that Opera GX is at 113.0.5230.135 now.

Also note that using any of the Early Bird settings at the URL opera://settings/early_bird might cause bugs.

Any other ideas? This is really irritating. I see this griped about a lot when Googling, and many threads end with "it fixed itself after an update". Alas, for me this has persisted through several version upgrades to the browser.

I wish the Opera team would just add a flag in settings to enable or disable a fixed status bar on the bottom. That'd likely fix the issue, and those of us who care about this issue would be happy and those who don't could continue with no status bar and everyone wins.

EDIT: Actually, nevermind. It's no longer an issue. As soon as I bumped this post, it occurred to me - why don't I just make my own status bar using TamperMonkey/CSS/Javascript? Works very well. I figured I'd post it here in case anyone else is similarly aggrieved by this issue:

// ==UserScript==
// @name         View link URL
// @version      2024-10-01
// @description  Create temporary status bar to view link URL when hovering over a link
// @author       Strahan
// @match        https://*/*
// @grant        none
// ==/UserScript==

(function() {
  var link = document.createElement("div");
  link.id = "link";
  link.style.position = "fixed";
  link.style.bottom = "0";
  link.style.left = "0";
  link.style.backgroundColor = "rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.7)";
  link.style.color = "white";
  link.style.padding = "5px 10px";
  link.style.fontSize = "14px";
  link.style.display = "none";
  link.style.zIndex = "9999";
  document.body.appendChild(link);

  const links = document.querySelectorAll("a");
  links.forEach(a => {
    a.addEventListener("mouseover", () => {
      link.textContent = a.href;
      link.style.display = "block";
    });
    a.addEventListener("mouseout", () => {
      link.style.display = "none";
    });
  });
})();

If one is interested in this solution and has no idea what TamperMonkey is, it's an extension that lets you inject Javascript into a page to adjust how the page functions. Super useful. You can get it here: https://addons.opera.com/en/extensions/details/tampermonkey-beta Once you install it, just create a new script and replace everything there with the code I provided and save. Then any time you visit a page, it will show links in the lower left when you hover over them.

The status bar preview works in Edge/Chrome/Firefox in case that is relevant.