Turn on the link hover statusbar in Google Chrome

The official bug thread mentioned in Raveren's answer has been updated - several people, including me, have fixed this problem by disabling hardware acceleration (direct link to settings: chrome://settings/search#hardware%20acceleration):

• Open Chrome Settings
• Select "Show Advanced Settings"
• Scroll down to "System"
• un-check "Use hardware acceleration when available"

This worked for me, and is consistent with several problems I've had with both Google Chrome and various flavours of desktop Linux running on older (graphics) hardware.

Dragging the affected Tabs out of the window restores the URL target in the status bar

The bug (hovering an URL FAILS to trigger, in the bottom left corner of the tab, a temporary partial Status bar showing the target of that URL) has been narrowed with precision by "liam.bro..." on Sun 23 Feb 2014 17:10:41:

unveiled the cause: making a selection in a drop-down list triggers the bug in all the tabs in the current window

Whence an effective workaround: in the affected window, select all the tabs minus at least one (see Select and Move Multiple Tabs to a New Window in Chrome), and drag them out (thus creating a new window) or into another existing window: all the tabs at once recover their temporary partial status bar (for unknown reason, dragging ALL the tabs in a window doesn't work).

A few samples where to check it:

• In Issue 345698: REGRESSION: URL Not Displaying in Lower-Left Corner When Hovering Over Link, hover a few links and see the target; then top of that page in the 2nd Search box, select another choice than the default "Open Issues"; then hover the same link and check that the target doesn't show any more; then drag the tab out of the window and hover the link again and check the target is back
• In ASRock M8 Barebones Review: My Steam Box (drop-down list at the end of the article), or in any review on about any hardware site (most of them use the same drop-down menus).

Note: Google most often pays just gimmick-attention to users' feedback, never really read their bug reports or suggestions, often closes or even deletes the forum threads involved (thus following the same path as Microsoft, and eventually the same fate). In this case, Google has closed the Issue 345698 to anyone who would have an improvement, whence my inability to post there, and my posting here instead.

Versailles, Sun 09 Mar 2014 17:22:20 +0100