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Clever! Here's one way I can think of to fix it without just taking out the feature or trying to hide its results: redefine "visited" from being "visited ever,

Clever! Here's one way I can think of to fix it without just taking out the feature or trying to hide its results: redefine "visited" from being "visited ever, from anywhere" to "visited from here". For instance, if I visited a wikipedia article on my own, and it appeared on hacker news, it wouldn't appear as "visited". However, if I clicked on it from hacker news, next time I load hacker news the browser would mark it as visited. I think that would keep all the useful properties of visited, without leaking information.

derefr 10y ago
I like that! My own suggestion would be to make :visited something that renders at the browser-chrome level (like OS tooltips or IME controls), rather than the renderer level (like on-page find result highlights or selection-caret link outlines.) Don't hand the state to the renderer process in the first place; just stuff it in the renderer-inaccessible part of the DOM (like XHR response cookies) and then have the browser indicate where on the rendering surface the visited—or maybe unvisited!—links are, in some floating-control fashion (perhaps like Firefox's find-in-page scroll-bar notches.)
- dfabulich 10y ago
  Where would chrome like that appear in touch UI? Typically tooltips show on hover, but touch UI has no hover effect.
  - Senji 10y ago
    Doesn't need to be a hover element. It cam be an underline or a translucent square.
eriknstr 10y ago
>[...] redefine "visited" from being "visited ever, from anywhere" to "visited from here" [...] I think that would keep all the useful properties of visited, without leaking information. Almost. However, sometimes websites are linked to from multiple locations. E.g., there might be links to something posted both on /r/programming, on lobste.rs and on HN. I like the fact that a page I have visited ever, from anywhere, is marked as such everywhere.

derefr 10y ago

I like that! My own suggestion would be to make :visited something that renders at the browser-chrome level (like OS tooltips or IME controls), rather than the renderer level (like on-page find result highlights or selection-caret link outlines.) Don't hand the state to the renderer process in the first place; just stuff it in the renderer-inaccessible part of the DOM (like XHR response cookies) and then have the browser indicate where on the rendering surface the visited—or maybe unvisited!—links are, in some floating-control fashion (perhaps like Firefox's find-in-page scroll-bar notches.)

dfabulich 10y ago
Where would chrome like that appear in touch UI? Typically tooltips show on hover, but touch UI has no hover effect.
- Senji 10y ago
  Doesn't need to be a hover element. It cam be an underline or a translucent square.

eriknstr 10y ago

>[...] redefine "visited" from being "visited ever, from anywhere" to "visited from here" [...] I think that would keep all the useful properties of visited, without leaking information. Almost. However, sometimes websites are linked to from multiple locations. E.g., there might be links to something posted both on /r/programming, on lobste.rs and on HN. I like the fact that a page I have visited ever, from anywhere, is marked as such everywhere.