The Intrusive Pop-ups
Google Chrome continuously tests new user interface features to improve browsing speed. One such feature is the “Link Preview” system. When this feature is active, hovering your mouse cursor over any hyperlink on a webpage will automatically trigger a small, floating preview window displaying a snapshot of the destination page. While Google intended this to save you the trouble of clicking blindly, power users often find these floating cards highly intrusive. They can obscure the text you are currently reading, trigger accidentally when moving your mouse across the screen, and consume unnecessary bandwidth by pre-fetching data you never intended to view.
Disabling the Preview Engine
Because Link Previews are often rolled out as an experimental or rolling-release feature, there is usually no standard toggle for them in the main settings menu. To permanently stop these pop-ups from appearing, you must disable the underlying rendering engine via Chrome’s hidden flags menu.
Open Google Chrome, click the address bar, type exactly chrome://flags, and press Enter to open the advanced configuration portal. In the search box at the top of the page, type Link Preview. You should see a specific flag titled “Link Preview” or “Enable Link Preview.” Click the dropdown box to the right of the flag’s name and change the setting from “Default” to Disabled. A blue “Relaunch” button will appear at the bottom of your browser window. Click it to restart Chrome. Upon reopening, hovering over links will simply display the destination URL in the bottom corner of your screen, exactly as it always has.