Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Computing/2014 February 13

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February 13

Mousing over a link turns the page background white in IE

(As a preface, I like IE, I can't update past the version I'm on (last ver of 9) at present, and I'd not like to switch browsers. So please don't suggest that, because I've gotten that suggestion in the past when it wasn't really needed, and it just kind of annoys me. This issue doesn't truly bother me, I'm just curious as to why it's happening.) So, in IE9, when I mouse over a link on some pages with non-white backgrounds, the section of the background that is not white (presuming the background is not an image) will turn white (this is mostly noticeable to me when I'm in, say, Wikipedia space here, where the slightly blue content area becomes sharply white). Using here (and to a lesser extent, Tumblr) for testing, it seems to only happen with links to outside of the page; links internal to the page like section links do not produce the behavior. Links on Tumblr are strange, as it only seems to happen (in my testing so far) with the like and reblog buttons, but not the share links or links within a post (then again, Tumblr's behavior is strange itself in that the background does not turn white but a slight different (possibly either darker or more vibrant?) shade of blue than normal). When I mouse over the link, it takes about half a second to a second to produce this behavior. It also doesn't seem to happen on all websites (for instance, the Wikia I frequent doesn't seem to do anything), but I may be wrong. Is there any reason it does so? Thanks. - Purplewowies (talk) 22:25, 13 February 2014 (UTC)

This sort of behaviour would usually depend on the default (User Agent) stylesheet in the browser, so if this was happening on a site in IE but not others, I would suggest that the default stylesheet for IE has a background-color attribute for the a:hover pseudo-class (but other browsers do not, and the web designer of that site had not overridden it, like this:

a:hover {
 background: none;
}

However, the default style sheets for IE on http://www.iecss.com/ do not indicate any default style for a:hover, so I'm not sure this is it. Strangely enough, there was a weird bug in IE7 that would not allow a hover to trigger a background color change to white where that was specifically done in the CSS (Hover White Background Ignore Bug). --Canley (talk) 01:51, 14 February 2014 (UTC)