Hmm... the way I use it is that when I put the mouse on an item, that is the one I am looking at. So it is fine that some others are hidden. And when I want to see all items again, I move the mouse into an empty area (usually right next to the item I just looked at) so the popup goes away.

Also, I usually use the filters first. Say for laptops, I set the screen size to >=12inch and the weight to <=3pounds. So there ain't that many items left on the screen.

Do you use it differently?

Assumptions about how users will interact with your UX always end up badly.

I saw the "big grid" and was curious, so I hovered on the icons, moving along a line, just to get an idea of what the thing does. Doing that, I kept accidentally moving the mouse pointer off-axis so it went into the popup, and was "stuck" there, until I dragged it outside the popup again, and promptly lost track of what I had already glanced at.

This makes sense. One suggestion would be to add a "Click to hold" button, which will push the dialog pop-up into a corner, maybe in a condensed view, and allow you to select more items. Then you can do a selective comparison of multiple items at once.

"Click to hold" isn't a good name for the feature, but hopefully the idea makes sense.

Have you seen the "compare" button in the popup when you hover an item? It lets you highlight multiple items and compare them later.

I did, it just seems to highlight the items in the view? I was hoping to see all of the dialog boxes at once, somewhere. I'm using a laptop FYI so have plenty of screen real estate for that

It highlights the items, and the highlighted items are than offered as a comparison when you hover other items.