When you build interfaces with many tooltips and popovers, you need to manage these floating elements carefully to avoid clutter and performance issues. Each tooltip in the example above is attached to a list item, allowing users to see quick hints as they hover over each product. This approach works well for tooltips since they are small, lightweight, and only appear on hover, so having multiple tooltip instances is rarely a problem.

However, popovers often contain more complex or interactive content. If you create a separate popover instance for every button, you may end up with many duplicate DOM nodes and increased memory usage. This can also cause overlapping popovers if users open more than one at once, leading to a confusing experience.

To solve this, Tippy.js provides a singleton pattern for popovers. With a singleton, you create a single popover instance and share it among several triggers. When a user clicks a Show Details button, the singleton popover displays content relevant to that button—closing any other open popover automatically. This pattern improves performance by reducing the number of active popovers and helps avoid visual overlap. It also makes your UI feel more polished, as only one popover can be open at a time, and the transition between them is smooth.