User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060326 Firefox/1.5.0.3 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-2) Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.0.3) Gecko/20060326 Firefox/1.5.0.3 (Debian-1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.3-2) I have a table which sets td {white-space:nowrap; overflow:hidden;} so that large cells are truncated. I want td:hover to reveal the full contents of the cell. td:hover {overflow:visible} almost does what I want, but the new content is superimposed over the neighbouring cell. {overflow:visible; background-color:white} of course doesn't work because the background doesn't extend under the overflow. So I tried this: td { white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; } td:hover { overflow: visible; background-color: something...; float: left; OR postion:absolute; } The float or absolute puts the background under all of the td content, including the overflow. This does what I want, except for this odd bug: It seems as if, when the hover reveals the overflowed content, the cells to the right of the hovered-over cell get shifted to the right. It's not a shift by a number of pixels, but rather a shift by a number of columns; the table gains new columns to its right. I'll attach a test case. As you'll see it's from a webmail application. Just move the mouse around over the table to trigger the hovers and see the extra columns attach themselves. If you don't immediately see what I mean I can attach a screenshot. Sorry, I expect to hear that this is a dupe, but searching for the obvious keywords didn't find anything. This is with Firefox 1.5 on Debian. Reproducible: Always

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9a1) Gecko/20060526 Minefield/3.0a1 - Build ID: 0000000000 Confirmed. How odd.

We're leaving behind a pseudo cell (red)...

Thanks for the analysis Mats. Can ayone suggest an alternative way of getting the effect that I was looking for?

Fixed by checkin for bug 162063. Added test.