Comments on: a:visited Not Working In Firefox

By: Tom

Tom — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 18:52:19 +0000

Thanks – spent the last hour trying to figure it out – you’re a life saver!

By: Rapha

Rapha — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:12:28 +0000

Oh dear..

I didnt expect that my source code will be removed

CSS:

a
{
color : blue;
}
a.visited
{
color : silver;
}

Javascript:

function AnchorOnMouseUp ( AnchorId )
{
document.all.tags(“a”)[AnchorId].className = “visited”;
}

Onmouseup-behaviour:

onmouseup = “javascript:AnchorOnMouseUp(0);”;

Regards,
Rapha

By: Rapha

Rapha — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:04:34 +0000

Dear Terry.

Thx a lot for your article!

In my Firefox (v2.0.0.9), “Tools > Options > Privacy” is set to 9 days, and the order of the anchor-behaviour (:link, :visited, etc.) in the external CSS-file is correct – But the “:visited”-property is not working anyway in Firefox – I dont have any idea why..

How ever, here is a possible workaround.

Instead of using the built-in features of a browser, I (re-)define the name of the class which shall be used by a a-tag after a link was clicked. The different class names are implemented in CSS and a part of the website:

The changing of the name of the class is implemented in Javascript:

Then you have the define the onmouseup-behaviour of a a-tag:

Anchor #0

Please note that the parameter of the function call (in my example:0) must apply! So the first anchor calls with a “0″, the second one with a “1″ and so on. This is because Javascript enumerates webpage-elements starting with 0

I tested this in Firefox and in IEx (v7.x), it seems to work fine.

Best regards from Switzerland!
Rapha

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 04 Oct 2007 03:22:32 +0000

Asa, this is confusing to me because I don’t understand the mechanics of it all. But I have no problem with a browser retaining my surfing history during the current session.

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 22:40:15 +0000

Terry, if IE is showing you visited links as highlighted then it is not wiping everything clean when you close it. There is simply no way, short of magic, for the browser to mark your visited sites as visited if it doesn’t maintain a list. I guess IE figures you won’t mind if they keep around your data even if you explicitly tell them to remove it. At Firefox, when you clear or ask us not to keep data around, we actually listen.

- A

By: Terry

Terry — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 23:22:42 +0000

I don’t know Asa, IE handles it fine (I have it set to wipe everything when I close the browser). Maybe it is the history?

By: Asa Dotzler

Asa Dotzler — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 19:49:06 +0000

How would you propose a browser know which links to treat as visited without storing a list of visited links — history?

- A