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Modern browsers have begun deprecating the a:visited because of the privacy problems that allowing it exposed. (More details on http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/03/privacy-related-changes-com..., but essentially I could have the CSS set your visited link to a color, check that color in javascript and know if you'd been to that site.)

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You can still use :visited to change the link color, that's still supported, and it's the most common way a visited link is styled differently from an unvisited link. This way nothing gets positioned differently because a link has been visited, and javascript can lie about a link's colour.

So this sounds like a deliberate design decision, or at least a genuine design trend.

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