Man what a weirdly speculative article. Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days?
It's basically a tour of old hyperlink and windowing systems... with lots of guessing and maybes. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Win 3.1 had blue titlebars, for instance. The author never actually answers her question but I imagine the obvious guess is the correct one:
Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable. Just underlined wouldn't have worked because underline was already a popular style in text processing. So they decided to give it a different color too. Blue is the most logical choice as it has good contrast against a white background, and has a neutral meaning (compared to say, red). There weren't really a lot of color choices back then, the largest palette you could count on at the time was 16 colors.
This was what Mosaic did and most browsers that came after it (including the most influential: Netscape) did what Mosaic did.
And there certainly were browsers of the era that didn't use blue underline for links, the next most common paradigm was some kind of bordered box around the text (usually the same color as the text).
> Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days?
Mozilla amazes me with their org-bloat-to-products-they-sell-for-money ratio. They have programming language teams, research bloggers, occasional splashy products, an in-house bug tracker, and oh yeah, they make a web browser.
I don't know how they do it, but it seems to be working out for them. If I was the CEO of a company that only had one customer, I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write a programming language that's not even used for the core product. But, I guess that's why nobody ever asks me to be the CEO of a company!
I'm really glad that Mozilla is developing Rust. Even though I'm not using it (and haven't even learned it), it looks like a net positive for the world of software development. This is exactly the kind of thing that a nonprofit should do.
I agree, I don't think there's enough research here. If it were just one browser, perhaps designer choice.
But it is two browsers that chose blue, so perhaps there is some underlying Unix-y reason. Maybe early ncurses had chosen that blue for something unrelated to the web, and the decision goes back further.
Or maybe it was just lack of choices. For example, of the 16 original hex colors, blue & purple IMHO look the least like crap when mixed in with black text. Maybe its just that simple? red is too alarming, green is too bright, yellow/magenta/cyan/grey are too hard to read... now I'm speculating, but I think the answer might be an unrelated pattern in some other color-related origin.
“Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable.”
For a comment complaining about unsubstantiated speculation this struck me as exactly that…
The default background was gray for Netscape, even on Windows, presumably because that was the default background for common Unix toolkits like Motif/X. Even Internet Explorer defaulted to gray. See these Wikipedia articles containing screenshots:
In particular, notice the IE2 screenshot, which shows it displaying the more modern Wikipedia website using a gray background. IE2 doesn't understand CSS, so just displays the source. The CSS declares a white background, so we can infer that the HTML probably does not declare a gray background using the long forgotten BODY tag BGCOLOR attribute. (Rather, almost certainly the HTML doesn't use the BGCOLOR attribute at all.)
It's possible that Mosaic defaulted to white on Mac OS, but I doubt it. Netscape didn't back then, IIRC.
For a long time gray and gray-toned backgrounds were ubiquitous on the web. It was nice because white backgrounds are difficult on the eyes, especially for prolonged periods. Unfortunately, white eventually began to dominate, as it already did for most Windows and Mac applications. Now we're coming full circle with dark theming, though dark theming is typically much darker than the old web and old X applications.
Reads like a really young person who is overconfident in their abilities and lacks any actual experience with any of the things they mention. Every geezer on here knows Mosaic had blue links because they used it.
Blue has an established connotation for marking up text. E.g once upon a time a newspaper editor would scribble notes in original copy before sending to the printers. It stands out against black text but is unobtrusive.
That was a particular hue called “non-photo blue”. It photographed as white when using the common photo-offset printing process. So you could make comments, on the camera-ready copy, that people could read, but that wouldn’t reproduce. I’m old and had proofreading jobs in high school.
It’s camera-ready but might get some comments from a last-chance lookover: “Should this be capitalized?” written in the margin, for example. If the answer is no, it’s OK as is, then the copy can go to the camera without having to be set again. This is more a proofreading stage than an editing stage; that part is long over.
EDIT: Also used for printing instructions, to make sure that things come out in the right order, for instance.
My understanding was in those days copy and paste was a literal thing, so I guess what eventually went to the printer might end up being a frankendoc of sorts …
There is a neat technique called ”stripping in” that lets you cut a word out of the page and replace it with the corrected word from another page. You can use it to correct a misspelling if the length of the corrected word is the same as the wrong one; it avoids having to reset the whole page.
You put the page with the correct word underneath the copy, on a light table (a real one). With an exacto knife, carefully cut out the word, cutting through both sheets. Now the correct word fits exactly in the hole. Hold it together with a piece of white tape (standard supply in all these shops) on the back. The mend is invisible.
It was also the color in which TSR would print maps for old Dungeons and Dragons modules, so that players couldn't photocopy them and pass them around. Functioned as copy-protection.
That's really speculation but there are certainly reasons against it. Mostly that red-green blindness is the most common color blindness and that blue is considered a more serious color. For instance banks often choose blue as predominant color. Maybe that's also something worth considering for an experimental technology.
For the same reason they didn't use red. Red and green have meaning in many cultures, especially the one that invented the web. As stated by the parent commenter, blue is more neutral.
Maybe people back then want something different because the most common monitor back in the day was a green on black monitor. Having blue is refreshing looks new.
It's basically a tour of old hyperlink and windowing systems... with lots of guessing and maybes. I'm not sure why it's relevant that Win 3.1 had blue titlebars, for instance. The author never actually answers her question but I imagine the obvious guess is the correct one:
Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable. Just underlined wouldn't have worked because underline was already a popular style in text processing. So they decided to give it a different color too. Blue is the most logical choice as it has good contrast against a white background, and has a neutral meaning (compared to say, red). There weren't really a lot of color choices back then, the largest palette you could count on at the time was 16 colors.
This was what Mosaic did and most browsers that came after it (including the most influential: Netscape) did what Mosaic did.
And there certainly were browsers of the era that didn't use blue underline for links, the next most common paradigm was some kind of bordered box around the text (usually the same color as the text).