Hover pop-ups not properly rendered, appear as HTML blobs

[fowlay]

When hovering with the cursor over a function invocation I should get a pop-up that shows the EDoc or header comment of the function. This feature does not work in certain Eclipse+erlide combinations. What I get instead is a pop-up with a blob of text that looks like HTML code (by pasting this text into a Seamonkey composer buffer I can get a nicely rendered version of the pop-up).

Configurations where problem seen:
Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Oracle JDK 8, Eclipse Oxygen 4.7.3a, erlide 0.55.0.201807160859
Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (Xenial Xerus), Oracle JDK 8, Eclipse SimRel-2018-09, erlide 0.55.0.201807160859

The problem seems to be erlide related, because the hover functionality works correctly in Java projects.

For comparison, this is a configuration that does NOT have the problem:
Suse Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64), Oracle JDK 8, Eclipse Oxygen 4.7.3, erlide 0.55.0.201807160859

[vladdu]

This problem is caused by the system not having libwebkit installed (or the wrong version), so the embedded browser doesn't work. For older eclipse version one can use Mozilla's xulrunner, but I think it's not supported anymore.

There are explanations and details at https://www.eclipse.org/swt/faq.php#whatisbrowser (and the following answers) as to how to choose a certain browser. Maybe some combination of parameters will work for you (but these will have to be tailored for each system... which is a big pain)

Relevant info:
The browser versions that are supported by each Eclipse release are listed below. Note that Mozilla/XULRunner versions that are not final releases (eg.- betas, alphas, nightlies) are not supported, even if their version technically satisfies a listed version range. Also note that the Mozilla/XULRunner must be compiled for the same architecture as the SWT jar that is being used.

• Eclipse 4.8 and newer: XULRunner is no longer supported.
• Eclipse 4.5 to 4.7: Mozilla 1.4 GTK2 - 1.7.x GTK2, XULRunner 1.8.x - 1.9.x, 3.6.x, 10.x, 24.x and 31.x (but not 2.x nor other unlisted versions), WebKitGTK+ 1.2.x and newer (Note:Eclipse 4.5 support for XULRunner 31.x is not available on Linux due to Bug 467646.)
• Eclipse 4.4: Mozilla 1.4 GTK2 - 1.7.x GTK2, XULRunner 1.8.x - 1.9.x, 3.6.x, 10.x and 24.x (but not 2.x nor other unlisted versions), WebKitGTK+ 1.2.x and newer (Note:Eclipse 4.4 and newer uses GTK 3 by default and XULRunner cannot be used in this case as it is not ported to GTK 3 yet)