There are many things about the internet that we take for granted, but they’re the result of conscious choices made by the early pioneers in the space.
Marc Andreessen, the creator of Mosaic, has revealed how he’d chosen the colour blue for hyperlinks. Released in 1993, Mosaic was the first popular graphical web browser which integrated images and graphics into web browsing. Mosaic ultimately became the Netscape Navigator browser, and the company went public in 1993.
”I think you’re the guy to ask about this. Why are hyperlinks blue?” Andreessen was asked on a podcast. “Because I like blue,” he simply replied. “Nice firm color. It’s easy to see. Well, it had to be some colour,” he laughed.
“At the time we were (building browsers), a lot computers at that time only had 256 total colors,” Andreessen explained. “They had an eight bit color palette. And so you can kind of see all 256 colors and it’s like, take your pick. And so the hyperlinks could have been salmon. Or yellow. I mean, they had to be something that actually stood out on the page. So it was basically gonna be blue, red, purple or green. I don’t like those other colors, (so hyperlinks ended up being blue),” he said.
“Also, I don’t like reading text on white backgrounds because my eyes are a little sensitive to light. And if you look at early Mosaic and Netscape, the backgrounds are always gray. And so it was black text on gray backgrounds, and I used to get a lot of flak for that,” he added.
Andreessen said that there was something he really wanted to implement in browsers, but was constrained by the realities of that time. “But what I really wanted was dark mode,” he says. But I couldn’t get there at that point, because the displays weren’t good enough to do white text on black backgrounds. It was hard to read because you didn’t have enough shades of gray and you couldn’t quite have the screen resolution to have that be a appealing thing,” he said.
As it turns out, Andreessen’s choice seems to have stood the test of time. While some blogs like to experiment with their hyperlink colours, most links are still blue by default, and turn purple once they’ve been clicked. It’s a part of the web that now so ingrained in people’s collective memory that it might stay this way for decades to come. And it didn’t start because of some lofty design goals, or deeper meaning — hyperlinks are blue because their creator happened to like the colour blue.