Kev Quirk's post on styling :visited links sparks small dev debate
A blogger's decision to color visited links purple prompts discussion on Lobsters and Hacker News about whether custom CSS or browser defaults handle link history best.
What to know
- The story centers on a short blog post by Kev Quirk about styling the CSS :visited pseudo-class, not a major tech announcement.
- Quirk changed his own site to color visited links purple after noticing the behavior in his RSS reader Miniflux.
- Discussion on Lobsters splits between using custom CSS to style visited links and relying on (or fixing) browsers' native default link-color handling.
The dispute Whether developers should style :visited links themselves or trust (and push browsers to improve) native default link coloring. · positions read across 36 posts and comments
Custom :visited styling is genuinely useful for tracking which links/pages have already been visited.
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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.”
m_eiman · Lobsters ↗
Sites shouldn't override link colors at all; leave it to the browser's own defaults, which already differentiate visited links.
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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.)”
koala · Lobsters ↗
Browser default color schemes for links are themselves poorly designed, undermining the case for relying on them.
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“Last I looked, the default dork mode colour scheme on some browsers has rancid colour choices with unreadably poor contrast.”
fanf · Lobsters ↗
Kev Quirk Blogger, author of the original post
How it unfolded 3 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump postscomments
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Post reaches Lobsters and Hacker News, spawning CSS debate
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.)…”
— koala -
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.
2 more of the top 3 · 34 posts in this stretch
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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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Mastodon user calls the post reason to style :visited links
A fediverse user reshares the post, describing it as interesting and saying he might adopt the same styling on his own site.
“A really interesting post on the merits of styling :visited links in webpages. Might have to do that myself.”
— chris@fedi.freebooters.uk -
C
A really interesting post on the merits of styling :visited links in webpages. Might have to do that myself.
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Kev Quirk publishes post questioning :visited link styling
Quirk writes that he has always made visited links look identical to unvisited ones, but after seeing his RSS reader Miniflux color visited links purple, he changes the CSS on his own blog to do the same.
“I've always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven't been visited... until I actually used :visited in anger.”
— Kev Quirk -
first by Mastodon, 2d ago
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K
I always made the :visited attribute for hyperlinks look the same as links that haven't been visited, but now I'm questioning that behaviour. https:// kevquirk.com/do-you-use-visite d-on-links
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What people are saying 18 voices from 1 site · best of 36 · verbatim
- Why don't browsers provide better UI for users to customize link/visited colors themselves?
- Sep 22
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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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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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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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> 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…
- Sep 21
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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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> 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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.