Hovering over tooltip with vitest browser mode

Describe the bug

userEvent.hover and tooltip behavior

Hi! I ran into an issue while testing a component with a tooltip triggered on hover.

When using userEvent.hover(trigger), the tooltip never appears. After some investigation, it seems that although Playwright simulates hover events, there’s no initial pointer state, so the hover transition never actually occurs.

The only ways I’ve been able to make this work are:

Clicking document.body before hovering (to establish pointer state), or

Using Playwright’s page.mouse.move, which isn’t available when running tests in browser mode.

My questions:

Is this behavior expected for userEvent.hover?

Is clicking document.body an acceptable workaround, or is there a recommended pattern for hover-based UI like tooltips?

Can calling render method set the initial state so the click on document.body is not needed?

Thanks!

Reproduction

https://stackblitz.com/~/github.com/thaynarbo/hover-issue

System Info

System:
    OS: macOS 15.3.1
    CPU: (10) arm64 Apple M4
    Memory: 78.09 MB / 16.00 GB
    Shell: 5.9 - /bin/zsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 20.19.0 - /Users/thaynar.lima/.nvm/versions/node/v20.19.0/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.22 - /Users/thaynar.lima/.nvm/versions/node/v20.19.0/bin/yarn
    npm: 11.7.0 - /Users/thaynar.lima/.nvm/versions/node/v20.19.0/bin/npm
    Watchman: 2024.12.02.00 - /opt/homebrew/bin/watchman
  Browsers:
    Chrome: 144.0.7559.110
    Safari: 18.3
  npmPackages:
    @vitejs/plugin-react: ^5.1.1 => 5.1.2 
    @vitest/browser-playwright: ^4.0.18 => 4.0.18 
    playwright: ^1.58.1 => 1.58.1 
    vite: ^7.2.4 => 7.3.1 
    vitest: ^4.0.18 => 4.0.18 
    vitest-browser-react: ^2.0.5 => 2.0.5

Used Package Manager

npm

Validations

• Follow our Code of Conduct
• Read the Contributing Guidelines.
• Read the docs.
• Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
• Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
• The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

Start with the linked StackBlitz reproduction and trace how userEvent.hover behaves in Vitest browser mode with Playwright. Confirm whether the tooltip can appear without clicking document.body or using page.mouse.move; done means the hover-triggered tooltip works through the supported browser-mode interaction path.