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I come with a seemingly simple question: should outbound links be styled differently than intra-site links? For example, the way Wikipedia does it with an icon after the text of the link. Do users care? Did anyone done any research on that?

I’m thinking of situations where you might have a sentence like ‘I’ve written about this before, and recent events around ACME corporation only made me entrenched in my opinion.’ where ‘written about this before’ would be a link to another page on the website and ‘recent events around ACME corporation’ would be link to external site.

I do like it when they’re styled differently. Not on all sites, but in an article based site, yeah.

I always do it. Getting thrown into another website forces you to switch context entirely, and also is a privacy and security right of the user to know they are going to be moved somewhere else.

That’s also my thinking, but it does add some visual clutter plus wouldn’t the counterargument be that people who really care can use their own user styles or extensions, or look at the status bar?

No I don’t accept the counter argument as an argument. People who care shouldn’t jump through hoops to get what they deserve.

And the visual clutter is way too little to care.