Is this on Google?

A few possible explanations:

(1) Firefox is set not to remember any history here:

"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options > Privacy

Either:

• Firefox will: "Never remember history"
• "Remember my browsing and download history" unchecked
• Possibly: "Clear history when Firefox closes" with "Browsing & download history" checked

(2) Specific site specifies the same color for visited and unvisited links (but that should not occur on Google)

(3) Options set to the same color here:

"3-bar" menu button (or Tools menu) > Options > Content > "Colors" button

Normally the colors set by the site will be used, but if you uncheck the box allowing pages to set the colors, then your choices here will be used. (The results might not always be attractive...)

(4) Something else TBD

I forgot to mention something: I was responding as if you had asked why visited links were still blue instead of turning purple. However, if you meant something else, could you explain what you used to see and what you see now that's different?

When I do a search and it brings up the results and when I visit one of the sites and then go back one screen it used to turn that site heading purple. Now since I have upgraded it doesn't highlight the visited site which makes it more difficult to keep track of the sites already visited.

I have selected Tell sites I don't want to be tracked Remember History History and Bookmarks

I compared my Firefox 30.0 settings on my Windows 7 machine which is working to my XP machine which is not working and the settings are the same. If we can't get this to work is there a way to downgrade to the previous version? Thanks

Which search site do you use?

If you reload the page after going Back to your results (Ctrl+r) do the visited links turn purple?

DuckDuckGo is my search engine

The Control R only temporarily highlight the visited site. As soon as you search another site the highlighting goes away,

I got it to work by going to Tools - Options - Content - Colors - and unchecking "Allow pages to choose their own colors, instead of my selection above"

This is only for XP my Windows 7 machine works fine with that checked and I'm using the same search engine on both boxes.

You can open the links in a new tab by middle-clicking the link on the search results page. You you can close the tab to return to the page with the results to avoid using the back button.

Is Firefox using the disk cache?

You can inspect the current cache usage on the about:cache page.

• you can open about: pages via the location bar.

Hmm, it works if you reload, but when you go back the effect is lost. Could you test something. Firefox caches the last state of the page, and it may be failing to update the cached version.

This workaround turns off the feature that tries to save time redrawing the page:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste sess and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.sessionhistory.max_total_viewers preference and change the value from -1 to 0 (that's a zero).

(Please don't change any other similar-sounding settings to 0 or you may disable Firefox's ability to save/restore your open windows and tabs.)

Then reload the problem page. Hopefully after that you won't need to reload. Any luck?