Show HN: A chrome extension that fades out old links on HN/Reddit/News sites

I hate it soo much. Pervasive spying doesnt help either. YT for example loves to generate custom redirects for all offsite links posted in video description/comments :(.

You can fix videos by injecting

    // make visited links distinct
    injectStyle('.yt-lockup-title a:visited {color: black;}');
    injectStyle('#watch7-sidebar .video-list-item a .title {color: #167ac6;}');
    injectStyle('#watch7-sidebar .video-list-item a:visited .title {color: #141761;}');
    injectStyle('a.yt-uix-sessionlink {color: #167ac6 !important;}');
    injectStyle('a.yt-uix-sessionlink:visited {color: #141761 !important;}');

but things like external links and playlists require looping over document.getElementsByClassName("yt-uix-sessionlink"), monitoring DOMNodeInserted, and injecting history.pushState(null, null, 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v='+videoID) for all the garbage filled YT links (what you get when clicking on playlist video). I pack all of it into my custom tempermonkey script.

I added a script on greasemonkey for HN visited linked with : I dont remember where did I get that code, but it work for me.

    // ==UserScript==
    // @name     HN visited link
    // @version  1
    // @grant    all
    // ==/UserScript==
    
    let aCss = `
        .news-list a:visited {
    			color: lightgray;
        }
    `
    
    addGlobalStyle(aCss);
    function addGlobalStyle(css) {
        var head, style;
        head = document.getElementsByTagName('head')[0];
        if (!head) { return; }
        style = document.createElement('style');
        style.type = 'text/css';
        style.innerHTML = css;
        head.appendChild(style);
    }

How much work would it be to support all websites by default with this feature?

Probably the web is trying to align behaviour with native apps? I don't know much apps that express if you have seen something through the UI.

I can offer my partial explanation why this happens. When a site wants to stylize the underline using a background property, it cannot change this property for :visited. This includes sites trying to have a different color for the underline (CSS text decoration module 4, supported by both Firefox and Chromium now) or trying to ensure the underline do not touch a glyph (not supported natively in Firefox, CSS text decoration module 4 too) or wanting to control the width of the underline (still CSS text decoration module 4, not supported by anything). Hopefully, this will go away in the future.

Some sites may also just don't see the value of distinguishing visited links from unvisited ones. That's a shame.

> Does Chrome on Android even support extensions?

Nope. Only Firefox does (as far as I know).

EDIT: Apparently Yandex is built on Chromium and allows installation of Chrome desktop extensions (only in the alpha version though). Maybe that's what author meant: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.yandex.bro...

I wrote https://github.com/raszpl/hackahackernews to do it on HN. Tracks posts and comments.

visited link enabler – Add-ons for Firefox – https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/visited-link-...