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Comment by Jaruzel | Hacker News Reader

I know this fades them out, whether you've clicked on them or not, but it makes me think about how so many sites no longer use a:visited properly, and just style it the same colour as un-visited links. Each day, web usability takes a step backwards. How many extra extensions do we have to start installing before it becomes usable again?! Sometimes I really miss HTML 2.0.

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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);
    }

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.

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.

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.

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

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