176661 - Mouse cursor indicates if link is opened in new or current window etc.

Status: VERIFIED DUPLICATE of bug 14027

(Core :: XUL, enhancement)

Description

[René Stach]

When I click a link I am often not aware if the link is opened in the current window, in a new window or in a new small window (pop-up). Furthermore, some of my friends wish to be able to see if a link is internal (belongs to the same domain) or leads to an external page. Other ideas are if pages are located in the same directory, a level up or down etc. Summarizing, people want to know what kind of action is triggered by clicking a link and roughly where the link is pointing to (without having to look into the status bar and compare to the address bar).

But how can this infomation be made clear to the user?
 - the mouse cursor could show
 - a tooltip should contain this information
 - small icons added to each link could show

All these solutions have their advantages and disadvantages. Solution 3 (which I prefer) may disturb the page design and flood a page with lots of small icons attached to each link. Indeed, the icons perfectly show where you can find internal and external links etc. So, you get a quick overview over all the links on a page and you can easily find links that look like normal text. Solution 2 might interfere with other tooltips (like the title attribute of images) and solution 1 would be a technically clean solution as it would not interfere with anything, but you won't get the kind or overview as solution 3 would give you. So, I guess using different mouse cursors to indicate what action a link triggers (new window, current window, etc.) and where this link is pointing to (internal link, directory down, directory up, external link).

I hope you find this a nice idea,


René

Comment 1

[Boris Zbarsky [:bzbarsky]]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 14027 ***

Comment 2

[timeless]

vrfy dupe