Links opening in new windows and tabs can be very intrusive to your browsing experience. Here’s a way to visually identify such links on a page. You can do this by making a small changes in the userContent.css. The userContent.css is a stylesheet which enables you to change the appearance of web content on the web-page. Lets first locate/create userContent.css and thereafter look at the copy/paste part.

Locate/Create userContent.css:

1. Type “%appdata%” in Start Menu search box. (for windows users)
2. Locate the folder “Mozilla” and follow the path Mozilla > Firefox > Profiles > xxxxxxxx.default > chrome, where xxxxxxxx is a random number generated for your firefox profile.
3. Create a file “userContent.css” or rename the file “userContent-Example.css” if it exists.
4. Open the file with the text editor of your choice.
5. Append the required code — the code for highlighting the link or the code for changing the cursor on mouse hover.
6. Save the changes and restart Firefox.

Code for highlighting the link:

/* Highlight the links which pop up in new window:*/
:link:hover[target="_blank"],:visited:hover[target="_blank"] {
color: black !important; background: #00FFFF !important;
}
:link:hover[target="_new"],:visited:hover[target="_new"] {
color: black !important; background: #00FFFF !important;
}

Code for changing the cursor:

/* Change cursor for links that open in new window */
:link[target="_blank"], :visited[target="_blank"],
:link[target="_new"], :visited[target="_new"] {
cursor: help;
}


If you are CSS savvy you can induce some creativity and style these links the way you like. It’s just simple CSS.

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