How to jump to visited links on a page?

August 22, 2005 10:55 AM

I was going through some online journals my school subscribes to, and I noticed that one reference I was tracking down was in an issue I'd already visited. This made me wonder if I could, after visiting the issue, have my browser jump to any links I'd already followed. Does anyone know how to do this/if it can be done?

Obviously the browser is remembering that I visited the link, since the link text is purple. Can I (easily) make use of that? FWIW, I'm using Firefox 1.6.

posted by solotoro to Technology (11 answers total)

Ctrl-H?
posted by Vidiot at 11:23 AM on August 22, 2005

Response by poster: Hm, the history's not *exactly* what I'm looking for, but organizing it by site is a bit of a help, thanks!
I was looking for something that acts more like the text finder does, where it just highlights links you've already been to and jumps to them on the page (rather than jumping straight to opening the link).
posted by solotoro at 11:53 AM on August 22, 2005

Haven't tried this out, but maybe you could edit the userChrome.css file to add a short string of characters (say, "+v") to visited links, and then do a search for that string in the document? That's the only solution that comes to mind right now, but like I said, not sure if it would work (or if it would serve the purpose you describe).
posted by mumble at 11:55 AM on August 22, 2005

Whoops, I meant userContent.css. More info on styling visited links here.
posted by mumble at 12:07 PM on August 22, 2005

Whoops again. This doesn't work. Apparently I haven't fully understood CSS, sigh.
posted by mumble at 12:14 PM on August 22, 2005

That's genius, mumble. You could additionally make the +v really small and superscript, so you'd still find it with Find As You Type, but it wouldn't get in the way otherwise.
posted by grouse at 12:16 PM on August 22, 2005

If you don't want to monkey with userContent.css, you can add a favelet that will do a similar thing. Add this link: :visited it to your links toolbar, and you can click to add the "+v" to all visited links. This way it only affects the pages you want it to affect...

you can tweak it to style the "+V" to your liking.

(based on a favelet found here)
posted by misterbrandt at 1:01 PM on August 22, 2005

You could also modify the generated content to be an anchor like <a name='visited'>+v</a> and then add a SECOND link in your links toolbar that jumps to #visited, except that I just tried it, and firefox converts my #visited url to http://#visited. So if you could work around that problem, you could click click click to cycle through the anchors.
posted by misterbrandt at 1:23 PM on August 22, 2005

You also might try the opposite. Style the links you haven't already followed with a display:none favelet. That will leave only the visited links on the page.

Then use the built-in tabbing function of your browser to go from link to link (all previously visited).

You'd also probably want a favelet to set everything back right again.
posted by Jeff Howard at 1:58 PM on August 22, 2005

No really, the "+v" thing doesn't work. Adding an :after value to the link text doesn't affect the source code of the anchor, so Find As You Type won't detect the change. Would have been really nice, though.

I did poke at bookmarklets as a potential solution, but could only find a "hide visited links" script. However, you can easily edit the CSS bit to highlight visited links with a bright green background or something; this will make it at least easier to spot them when scrolling through a document and can be undone by simply reloading the page.
posted by mumble at 2:43 PM on August 22, 2005

Here's a modification of mumble's script that hides all links except the visited ones. Source code. Essentially it's hiding all links, then unhiding all elements with a :visited pseudo class.

It doesn't seem to suffer from the Find as you Type problem. Just set your browser to tab to every link.
posted by Jeff Howard at 5:26 PM on August 22, 2005