The "Faster Research" Hack: Color visited links prominently.

More striking color for the links you visited

Internet browsers color the search results violet for pages that have already been visiting in the past, and those that have not yet been visited in the infamous dark blue. For many, these two colors can hardly be distinguished from each other.

If you research a lot on the internet this productivity hack is guaranteed to make your life easier. Let’s invest the 5 minutes to do it right along.

TL; DR

Use Firefox and create your own user profile for the various searches. Change the colors directly in Firefox.

Visited Links appear in a strong violet now.

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Choose a more striking color for visited links

Internet browsers color the search results of previously visited pages in violet, while those that have not yet been visited are dark blue. For many, these two colors can hardly be distinguished from each other.

This can be exhausting when researching sources, leads, etc. Especially so if you are plagued by color weaknesses, or the screen you are working on is of poor quality or poorly adjusted. So why not choose a stronger color to highlight the distinction between visited and not-yet-visited links?

Of course, this only works if your browser history is not being deleted every time the browser is closed, or after a certain time (usually 3 or 6 months)!

FIREFOX How to change the color of visited links in Firefox

The good people at Mozilla provide a quite nice guide for their Firefox browser themselves:

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/change-fonts-and-colors-websites-use

And the best thing about Firefox: You can make these settings directly in the browser.

CHROME - How to change the color of visited links in Chrome

Unfortunately, Google’s Chrome is not quite as equipped for that with accessible on-board tools as Firefox is. An extension is required here to adjust the link colors.

The only solution seems to be a Chrome extension. Install e.g. the free "Stylus" from the Google Webstore https://chrome.google.com/webstore/  Stylus is a user style manager.

It is only now, that you can make individual changes to the color:

• Start with a click on the menu button (icon with the three dots).
• Choose More Tools,
• And then extensions.
• Select Stylus from the list,
• And just click on details below,
• And expansion options.

See video below to watch and pause.

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• Click Manage Styles.
• Then create a new style.
• Give the style a unique name,
• And now add the style for visited links:

a:visited { color: #FF0000 !important }

• Click on "Save,
• and close the settings (the tab).

You might have to restart your browser.

Here again as a video to follow along:

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# FF0000 is the hex code that determines the color - in this case red.

You can choose your own color here: https://www.google.com/search?q=%23FF0000

If you have saved this new style, all visited links will from now on be displayed in the choosen color.

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Conclusion

The easiest solution would be to use Firefox. The Pro solution would be to create a separate user profile for the different searches and only to carry out the topic-related research in this. Don't forget to save your search history!