4 ms·

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 sy

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).

not2b 5y ago
Mosaic and Netscape didn't do black text on a white background. The default background was gray.
- andy_ppp 5y ago
  “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…
  - wahern 5y ago
    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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator 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.
- ebruchez 5y ago
  I seem to remember (Sun workstations) that Mosaic was white while Netscape was gray.
lupire 5y ago
Why not green?
- reaperducer 5y ago
  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.
  - DonHopkins 5y ago
    "While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined." -Ben Shneiderman Ben likes to actually run controlled experiments and measure things like that, instead of just speculating! ;) See the email quoted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  Green/Red has a connotation; plus green has poorer contrast. Blue is meaning-neutral and reads well.
  - rusk 5y ago
    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.
    - leephillips 5y ago
      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.
      - 5y ago
SavantIdiot 5y ago
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.
moralestapia 5y ago
>Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days? That would explain whatever happened to Firefox. Shameless plug: If anyone is looking to get rid of Chrome but don't like Firefox for any reason, try Brave, it is a great browser, really.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Or Ungoogled Chromium, if you're more interested in protecting your privacy than you are collecting $0.30 of digital currency every month.
jrockway 5y ago
> 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!
- nx7487 5y ago
  > I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write a programming language that's not even used for the core product. Rust is used in Firefox
- tomerv 5y ago
  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.
- ksherlock 5y ago
  Most of the rusty Mozilla team was laid off last year. Also: the MDN team.
satao 5y ago
Last year Mozilla laid off a lot of people from the MDN team. This might be the result of cutting costs for them.
queuebert 5y ago
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.

not2b 5y ago

Mosaic and Netscape didn't do black text on a white background. The default background was gray.

andy_ppp 5y ago
“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…
- wahern 5y ago
  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: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator 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.
ebruchez 5y ago
I seem to remember (Sun workstations) that Mosaic was white while Netscape was gray.

lupire 5y ago

Why not green?

reaperducer 5y ago
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.
- DonHopkins 5y ago
  "While red made the links easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the content declined." -Ben Shneiderman Ben likes to actually run controlled experiments and measure things like that, instead of just speculating! ;) See the email quoted here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104
mikepurvis 5y ago
Green/Red has a connotation; plus green has poorer contrast. Blue is meaning-neutral and reads well.
- rusk 5y ago
  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.
  - leephillips 5y ago
    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.
    - 5y ago

SavantIdiot 5y ago

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.

moralestapia 5y ago

>Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these days? That would explain whatever happened to Firefox. Shameless plug: If anyone is looking to get rid of Chrome but don't like Firefox for any reason, try Brave, it is a great browser, really.

smoldesu 5y ago
Or Ungoogled Chromium, if you're more interested in protecting your privacy than you are collecting $0.30 of digital currency every month.

jrockway 5y ago

> 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!

nx7487 5y ago
> I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write a programming language that's not even used for the core product. Rust is used in Firefox
tomerv 5y ago
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.
ksherlock 5y ago
Most of the rusty Mozilla team was laid off last year. Also: the MDN team.

satao 5y ago

Last year Mozilla laid off a lot of people from the MDN team. This might be the result of cutting costs for them.

queuebert 5y ago

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.