Browser :visited pseudoclass does not work

asked 2016-08-17 16:58:16 +0300

DaveRo gravatar image

updated 2017-09-02 14:49:26 +0300

Most (all?) browsers by default identify visited links. Firefox uses a purple-ish colour by default. Most modern sites override that in CSS so it's not as common to see this as it once was. But I regularly use a site - http://mudcat.org - which dates from the 1990s and I really need this 'visited' colour to identify new posts.

:visited in userstyles doesn't work either, so I suspect that it's not just that the browser doesn't colour links by default but that the :visited pseudoclass doesn't work at all.

https://github.com/sailfishos/sailfish-browser/issues/500

Update: 16-3-2017

I looked into this, so I'll record what I concluded.

Firefox (gecko) stores history in places.sqlite in the profile along with other stuff, notably bookmarks and favicons. The Jolla browser has no places database. It stores history in /home/nemo/.local/share/org.sailfishos/sailfish-browser/sailfish-browser.sqlite (table: browser_history). It stores bookmarks in bookmarks.json in the same directory.

So the failure to effect :visited isn't a bug so much as a result of a design decision. To fix it would require the css computation to point to the new history database.

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Comments

Now that I think about it, I have been annoyed by the lack of colored visited links before... I don't think it has ever worked. Have Jolla1

paperboy ( 2016-10-10 11:10:49 +0300 )edit

Firefox does not show visited links for long years. I think it was because of security concerns they removed this feature.

alloj ( 2016-10-10 14:06:28 +0300 )edit

@alloj No. What happened, a few years back, is that Firefox (and probably other browsers) restricted the attributes you could change with :visited. Changing 'color' is OK. It's mentioned here:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/:visited

DaveRo ( 2016-10-10 16:12:46 +0300 )edit