[tooltip] Preserve focus-opened tooltip on hover leave

[michaldudak]

Summary

• Keep a tooltip opened by focus open when the pointer leaves the focused trigger.
• Continue closing it on blur or Escape.
• Add regression coverage for focus -> mouseLeave -> blur/Escape.

Bug

A tooltip can be opened by focus and then closed by hover leave while the trigger still has focus. That leaves keyboard users with a tooltip that disappears even though the focus-open condition is still true.

Reproduction

• Before: https://codesandbox.io/s/yt6z9g?file=/src/App.tsx
• After: https://codesandbox.io/s/lr75l2?file=/src/App.tsx

Test plan

• pnpm test:jsdom TooltipRoot --no-watch
• pnpm test:chromium TooltipRoot --no-watch

[pkg-pr-new]

• base-ui-tanstack-start

• vite-css-base-ui-example

  pnpm add https://pkg.pr.new/mui/base-ui/@base-ui/react@4884
  

  pnpm add https://pkg.pr.new/mui/base-ui/@base-ui/utils@4884
  

commit: 53583d5

[code-infra-dashboard]

Bundle size

Bundle	Parsed size	Gzip size
@base-ui/react	🔺+347B(+0.07%)	🔺+116B(+0.08%)

Details of bundle changes

Performance

Total duration: 1,235.40 ms -156.25 ms^(-11.2%) | Renders: 50 ⁽⁺⁰⁾ | Paint: 1,885.71 ms -243.36 ms^(-11.4%)

Test	Duration	Renders
Tabs mount (200 instances)	233.51 ms ▼-59.82 ms(-20.4%)	4 (+0)
Tooltip mount (300 contained roots)	49.07 ms ▼-13.12 ms(-21.1%)	1 (+0)

10 tests within noise — details

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[michaldudak]

Codex Review (GPT-5.5)

Reviewed the full PR diff against freshly fetched upstream/master. Dominant type: bug-fix, with regression-test coverage for Tooltip focus/hover ownership.

1. Bugs / Issues (None)

I did not find any branch-relevant correctness issues in the changed hover ownership path.

Root Cause & Patch Assessment

The patch addresses the actual ownership problem: a focus-opened tooltip should not be treated as hover-owned while focus remains on the trigger or popup. Updating syncOpenEvent to let focus upgrade a hover-open event, then gating hover-close through isNonHoverOpenEvent(..., focusOwned), keeps the tooltip open for focus ownership without making stale focus events permanently sticky after blur.

Test Coverage Assessment

The new Tooltip tests cover the important regressions: focus-open -> mouse leave -> blur/Escape, hover-open -> focus -> mouse leave, and pending hover-open not overwriting focus ownership. These run through the existing contained/detached/multiple-detached trigger matrix.

Validated:
pnpm test:jsdom TooltipRoot --no-watch
pnpm test:chromium TooltipRoot --no-watch
pnpm test:jsdom useHoverReferenceInteraction --no-watch
pnpm test:chromium useHoverReferenceInteraction --no-watch
pnpm prettier --check ...
pnpm eslint ...
pnpm typescript

I did not separately replay the new regression tests on upstream/master.

Recommendation

Approve ✅

The implementation is narrowly scoped, matches the shared hover-interaction architecture, follows the repo’s DOM utility conventions, and the relevant Tooltip/hook/type/lint validation passes.

[atomiks]

I've noticed this in the past, but didn't consider it to be important to fix or possibly even desirable, especially without :focus-visible checks. I think we can leave this off?