Why the colour question is a trap
The accepted answer's argument is that either mapping forces the reader to work out what the colour refers to — the action, or its safety — and that this is processing you are asking of someone in the middle of deleting something. Its recommendation was to drop the puzzle: give the confirming button visual weight, make cancel recede, and label the button with the verb rather than with yes or no, since a button reading Delete needs no interpretation at all.
The case for keeping it red
- Red has carried danger for a very long time, and a search for delete iconography returns almost entirely red.
- In most interface conventions red already means error or destruction and green means success, so a green delete fights the rest of the system.
- One reply reframed it as a question about hesitation: people think twice before clicking red, so the question becomes which of these two actions you want them to hesitate over.
The answer that changes the question
- A confirmation is not a success or an error, so one reply argued the correct signal is a caution colour such as yellow, and that the wording should shift accordingly.
- Another proposed removing the dialogue: delete immediately and offer undo, the pattern familiar from mail clients.
- Its advantages as stated: one click instead of two, and no dependence on what a colour means in a given culture.
- Its costs, also stated: the undo is transient, it can be displaced by the next action, and it is gone once the page is left. It suits reversible deletions rather than permanent ones.
What the thread agrees on underneath
For all the disagreement about colour, no answer argued that colour alone should carry the meaning. Prominence, wording and whether the action is reversible all came up as doing more work than hue — which is also the safe conclusion for anyone whose users may not see red and green as distinct.