It's easy to repro on Mac OS X with VoiceOver.
1. VoiceOver Utility > Navigation > Mouse pointer : set to "Moves VoiceOver cursor"
2. Turn on VoiceOver
Now as you move the mouse it focuses whatever you hover over. (Warning, this can be very disconcerting if you're not used to it!)
3. Open hangouts.google.com and try hovering over icons and threads - it doesn't work very well.
Alternatively, open Accessibility Inspector. The same issue manifests with inspectors on Windows and Linux.
The hit testing generally works fine for simple web pages, but breaks in cases of z-indexing, overflow, and other more advanced layouts, because it's done based on the bounding boxes in the browser process.
Comment 1 by bugdroid1@chromium.org
, Oct 11 2016