Many times on the Internet we see links to web sites. Website link on Facebook profile, or Facebook link on website. If you look carefully in these cases, you will see that these ‘hyperlinks’ are always blue.
There are well-known reasons and history for choosing the color of hyperlinks as blue.
UX designer Alice Blanchard has solved this mystery. He researched the history of the Internet and collected various information about it. He wrote two articles on the Mozilla blog in 2021 and 2022 about these facts and figures.
Thinking about the color of hyperlinks started in 1985. At that time, a group of students conducted a study under Ben Schneiderman, professor of computer science at the University of Maryland, USA. This study deals with how a hyperlink of color affects the user.
“Red makes the link more visible, but it reduces the ability of the user to read the context of the text and hold attention,” says Schneiderman. But blue color does not have this problem. Even on a white background, this color looks bright enough. On a black background, this color stands out distinctly. This color also does not disturb the attention of the readers.
From the mid-1980s to the end of that decade, an important topic of debate was the user interface of the Internet. Website builders were quite interested in what type of design is more useful, or which design will be established as a standard in creating a website so as Internet Hyperlinks.
For these reasons, Schneiderman and his students’ research and experiments on what color hyperlinks should look like or what hypertext should look like have been widely featured in important journals and conferences.
The idea of blue color for hyperlinks is more popular.
The mid-1990s saw the use of blue hyperlinks in some important software, such as Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web Browser and Marc Andreessen and Eric Binner’s Mosaic Browser.
Microsoft developed their web browser Internet Explorer using code from the Mosaic browser. Internet Explorer also uses blue hyperlinks. This once widely used browser basically put an end to all speculation about hyperlink colors. From that time this color becomes permanent.
Nowadays the internet is very wide and widespread. As a result, various websites choose hyperlink colors to match their brand. Various websites now display orange, purple, black, and yellow-colored hyperlinks.
Nevertheless, after all these years most websites still use blue hyperlinks.
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