Post reaches Lobsters and Hacker News, spawning CSS debate
3 Sep 21 7:42 AM · 4d ago · 3 posts · 5 comments · 3 sources · development 3 of 3
The post is submitted to Lobsters and later Hacker News; commenters on Lobsters debate whether custom :visited styling or relying on/fixing browser default link colors is the better approach.
“Or just don't use CSS to change colors and use the browser's defaults :) (That gives you different colors for visited links.)”
koalaKev Quirk Blogger, author of the original post
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Reported in the same hours no headline names this development itself — these 1 claim were published in its stretch
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first by Mastodon, 3d ago
What people said 24 voices · best of 34 · verbatim
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This just seems untrue? It’s a tiny micro hostility against your users > I've always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven't been visited, and it seems that it's the default behaviour across the web.
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General and longstanding consensus is to treat nav bar links differently from content links. Content links should always be coloured (ideally blue but purple when visited; but brand accent colour and no visited is also common) and underlined at least on hover (I think we got past the no-underlines-at-all stage? I’m actually a little uncertain…
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:visited is very useful when clicking around to research things, to avoid opening the same page five times because I've forgotten what I've looked at and not. And to follow my own footsteps when I'm looking for the same thing a few days later.
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I think a lot of people, over the years of designing web apps where you go the same pages a lot and don't want every link in your nav bar to be a different color all the time, defaulted to just disabling :visited states by making them the same color.
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Or just *don't* use CSS to change colors and use the browser's defaults :) (That gives you different colors for visited links.) (I just `color-scheme: light dark;` to `:root` because that seems to respect users' preferences a tad bit more.)
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Analysing `:visited` colours was used as an earlier form of user finger printing. Ensuring `:visited` always has the same colour wrt the plain link isn't so much micro hostility as a remnant from that time: websites shouldn't be able to tell which sites you've visited just by dropping a list of 1000 links in a hidden div and then profiling you…
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Some us still have scars from when ie changed the default background of web pages from gray to white and our gifs no longed blended properly.
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I think it often makes sense. For instance, on this website, at the very top of the page there’s a navbar with “Active”, “Recent”, “Comments” links. They have the same style regardless they are visited or not. And it makes sense, because the content of these pages is constantly changing, so a :visited style would not give any relevant information.
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Last I looked, the default dork mode colour scheme on some browsers has rancid colour choices with unreadably poor contrast. Dunno if more of them have been fixed since then.
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I didn't realize how much I'm used to `:visited` until I looked at a site where the link color was, by default, quite similar to the default `:visited` color. I though, "oh, I must have seen all of these pages." and then I realized that all of the links were the same color. it's really quite a simple and useful feature depending on the kind of…
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> I would love to live in a world where browser color themes are a thing just like they are in editors and terminals. I think terminal themes are a actually the worst possible implementation of this concept nightmare to develop around, because even things like "is brgrey actually brighter than grey" don't have a fixed answer. And Solarized does a…
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Honestly props to lobste.rs for styling visited links on their own home page. Yeah I mostly see the anti pattern on tailwind sites or otherwise framework heavy code bases with a css reset and zero thought given to user convenience.
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Yeah, the missing piece of the equation is that no one would customize the default colors in the browser because it won't do anything on 99% of the sites they browse, so why would browsers provide nice UIs to do that? I would love to live in a world where browser color themes are a thing just like they are in editors and terminals. The Lagrange…
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> Personally (speaking as a user) I find :visited to feel very hostile and judgy (almost stressful..) Interesting! I rarely use it myself, but reading another comment in this thread I realised that I do occasionally use the fact that visited links on the lobsters (and HN) homepages are coloured. It's helpful if I trying to locate that link I saw a…
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TIL: `:visited` is still a thing. I thought they got rid if it because of history sniffing issues. But no, they "just" modified it so that it couldn't change geometry and altered the javascript API that lets you get an element's computed style. https://salivity.github.io/css/article/understanding-css-visited-privacy-restrictions That seems like a…
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Haha, I didn't know about that. But this is why I'm such a minimalist. The less you do, the fewer problems you have :) (0 images in my personal website, over 400k words :) On one hand, it's unfortunate that browsers don't change to break backwards compatibility (I'm sure defaulting to `width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0`, nicer CSS defaults…
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This inspired me to finally implement it on [my site](https://pta2002.com). Unfortunately the inset box-shadow trick I was using to fill the background on link hover doesn't work ([:visited only affects a few properties, and box-shadow isn't one of…
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While it is true that there were privacy issues with `:visited` I really don't see at all what that has to do with the vast majority of the internet today, where my blocking plugins prevent a hundred plus requests per page load, that clearly just do it for aesthetic reasons. I don't think those websites are worried they might accidentally track me…
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As I noted in a comment on this article . . . > Just FYI: for anyone who use a Blink-based browser (Chrome/Edge/Brave/Vivaldi/etc.), this change helps only if the link was visited from one’s currently-viewed site: [Chrome Developers article from 2025](
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When I built my own RSS reader, I wanted something like a "read" marker but didn't want to introduce persistent storage. `:visited` solves this issue perfectly. On my website, I use very stylized link underlines so currently I don't - but maybe I should?
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IE never used Gecko. Microsoft started IE off by buying Spyglass Inc.'s version of Mosaic, and then continued to develop it in-house since (until they finally gave up, and made the Chromium-based version of Edge)
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This example of leak based on user interaction is quite interesting/funny: https://ronmasas.com/posts/the-human-side-channel. Partitioning visited unfortunately makes visited state less interesting...
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Yeah, it happened when IE first used it's own engine and broke away from gecko. Gecko never changed their default, but the new mozilla/firefox engine did use white as the default background color. When this version of IE came out it had ~25% market share, but that inverted over the next few years, so the default change ramped up quickly. A lot was…
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But Fx allows you to change these value in `about:config`: `browser.active_color.dark`, `browser.anchor_color.dark`, `browser.visited_color.dark` (sans `dark` is the default theme). This is one more point in using the user agent defaults since users can change these to their liking. These don’t work on Android tho… very sadly since I want to use…
All 3 developments of Kev Quirk's post on styling :visited links sparks small dev… →
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