How Safari gets it right, part 2
Safari doesn't let you change the colour of links, because you never would do it normally, and it's better and easier for you not to have the choice.
I’m playing around with the style sheet on the Neopets site, which will soon feed back into the main site, and I was looking for colours for headings and so on. I thought “aha, rather than starting up Photoshop, I’ll go to Safari’s preferences and edit the colours in there, using the nifty Apple standard colour chooser thing, which will save me time.”
It was only then that I realised that Safari doesn’t have a preference option for changing the colour of links, in all their flavours (unvisited, visited, active and hover). Because people never need to change that.
I certainly never have in any of my previous browsers. The only thing I’ve ever changed in that sort of preference is to set the default background colour from Netscape grey to white.
Well done, Safari, for removing that preference. Because nobody needs it, and in fact a browser should do all it can to ensure that, if a web site doesn’t say otherwise, links are blue, visited links are purple and active links are red. Because that’s the standard, and the world is a better place if we stick to it.
(If for some reason you really need to change the colours, you can do it via an external style sheet.)