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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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.
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