This is very fitting for this as I was probably about 5 when I first asked but never got a good answer “it’s just how it is” or something similar.
But when your on the desktop of your computer you double click to open a file or a program, but on the internet you single click everything.
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At the end of the day it’s a design decision. The main reason it’s used in operating systems is because clicking and dragging is a common operation. This isn’t the case for most websites, so it would be pointless to make you click twice.
On your computer, you are just as likely to need to select one or more items as you are to have them open. If you want to move a file from your desktop to a folder, you single click it then drag it. If you want to select 5 items, you hold the control button and single click all 5 items.
In a web browser, you usually are not going to interact with any element other than a hyperlink, and the hyperlink has a specific function of opening another page when clicked. You can’t grab a hyperlink and move it to a different area on the page. You can’t control+click to grab 5 hyperlinks at the same time.
Lots of reasons, but part of it is the level of control.
On your desktop, you can click on a file, move it around, change it’s name, group it up with other files, etc. You’ve got a lot more control.
On the internet, you just click. You can’t rename things, or move anything around. You have no control over the experience, so you need fewer options to navigate it.
Of course, phones and tablets have been working for a while to try and find non-double-click ways to let you manipulate files like a desktop, but (for me at least) none of them work as well as the original.
You don’t single-click _everything_ on the web anymore. Now we have much more interactive websites, where you can single click to select something, and then do other things with that selection.
On the desktop, single-click is “select”, and double-click is “activate” – open a file, run a program, whatever. On the web, with hyperlinks specifically, there’s no utility to being able to select a link – there’s nothing else to do with it! You can click it, and follow where it goes, or you can ignore it and stay where you are.
I don’t know if it’s still possible, but older editions of Windows had settings to let you treat your desktop like a web browser, and single-click to start programs. Always drove me crazy, because then you can’t click to select and use keyboard shortcuts.
Because when it comes to files, sometimes you don’t want to open them but you want to highlight them instead so you can use keyboard commands like CTRL + C (to copy) or SHIFT and then one-click multiple files to highlight them.
If you want to highlight texts or links, you can drag your cursor over it (unlike files, which ends up getting moved along with the cursor).
You can change it if you want, it’s pretty arbitrary. They were both design decisions at the time. The first computer GUI ever made was the Xerox Alto in like 1973 and actually used a 3-button mouse. Steve Jobs hated all the buttons and insisted Apple use a 1-button mouse for the Lisa (1983) so the designers at the time figured they could differentiate between single click, two fast clicks, and clicking and holding to gain more interactivity out of a single button. Microsoft used single-click to select and double-click to execute for the old DOS Executive launcher in Windows 1.0. A few other OS’s used different mousing models like Amiga, but after 1985 it was pretty much all double-clicking.
The core “stuff” of the internet like HTML, HTTP, etc aren’t really intended for the way we interact with them nowadays. The original vision the early web came from was more like a choose-your-own-adventure book than the rich dashboard applications we have now. Links allowed you to jump between pages and the entire web was seen as more of an actual web of knowledge rather than the islands contemporary sites act like. In the early days of Javascript adoption by web browsers developers had a philosophy of “progressive enhancement”, so the JS was only there to add bells and whistles or streamline the process but fundamentally sites were built to work without the scripting. At some point that changed…2007 if I had to guess… but the elemental tidbits like links and form buttons are still single-clicks.
The “desktop metaphor” uses a single click to select an item, and a double click to “activate it” In the case of the “desktop” this represents things on your machine that you own therefore you can manipulate them, so you need a more complex set of controls.
A traditional, old school, webpage is a presentation medium, it presents formatted text and images with relevant hyperlinks. You don’t own this content and therefore cannot manipulate it. The only items that were actionable were hyperlinks, and all you could do is follow them, not manipulate them in any way. All you were allowed to do is to click on them, so you only needed one action, the single click.
Most of the time links on webpages are more similar to buttons than they are to applications on the desktop. You also single click buttons in desktop applications.
If a webpage uses a control where you can both select and activate an item, it uses the single click – double click pattern most of the time, too.
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