Make Bootstrap Popover Appear/Disappear on Hover instead of Click

Set the trigger option of the popover to hover instead of click, which is the default one.

This can be done using either data-* attributes in the markup:

<a id="popover" data-trigger="hover">Popover</a>

Or with an initialization option:

$("#popover").popover({ trigger: "hover" });

Here's a DEMO.

I'd like to add that for accessibility, I think you should add focus trigger :

i.e. $("#popover").popover({ trigger: "hover focus" });

If you want to hover the popover itself as well you have to use a manual trigger.

This is what i came up with:

function enableThumbPopover() {
    var counter;

    $('.thumbcontainer').popover({
        trigger: 'manual',
        animation: false,
        html: true,
        title: function () {
            return $(this).parent().find('.thumbPopover > .title').html();
        },
        content: function () {
            return $(this).parent().find('.thumbPopover > .body').html();
        },
        container: 'body',
        placement: 'auto'
    }).on("mouseenter",function () {
        var _this = this; // thumbcontainer

        console.log('thumbcontainer mouseenter')
        // clear the counter
        clearTimeout(counter);
        // Close all other Popovers
        $('.thumbcontainer').not(_this).popover('hide');

        // start new timeout to show popover
        counter = setTimeout(function(){
            if($(_this).is(':hover'))
            {
                $(_this).popover("show");
            }
            $(".popover").on("mouseleave", function () {
                $('.thumbcontainer').popover('hide');
            });
        }, 400);

    }).on("mouseleave", function () {
        var _this = this;

        setTimeout(function () {
            if (!$(".popover:hover").length) {
                if(!$(_this).is(':hover')) // change $(this) to $(_this) 
                {
                    $(_this).popover('hide');
                }
            }
        }, 200);
    });
}

The functionality, you described, can be easily achieved using the Bootstrap tooltip.

<button id="example1" data-toggle="tooltip">Tooltip on left</button>

Then call tooltip() function for the element.

$('#example1').tooltip();

http://getbootstrap.com/javascript/#tooltips

After trying a few of these answers and finding they don't scale well with multiple links (for example the accepted answer requires a line of jquery for every link you have), I came across a way that requires minimal code to get working, and it also appears to work perfectly, at least on Chrome.

You add this line to activate it:

$('[data-toggle="popover"]').popover();

And these settings to your anchor links:

data-toggle="popover" data-trigger="hover"

See it in action here, I'm using the same imports as the accepted answer so it should work fine on older projects.