Beware of Opening Links in a New Window

Neil Turner lists the top five reasons not to force links to open in new windows in the SitePoint article Beware of Opening Links in a New Window.

Ironically, Silktide SiteScore, where I found the link to this article, uses target="_blank" to open the link in a new window. Maybe they forgot to read the article before linking to it ;-)

January 2, 2005
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Posted in Accessibility Usability

Comments

1. January 2, 2005 by paul haine

I'm wary of a website that preaches about annoying web behaviours and yet has popup windows on its own site.

2. January 2, 2005 by Roger Johansson

Right. I forgot about the annoying popups on SitePoint. Guess they should read the articles they publish.

3. January 2, 2005 by Johan Svensson

I truly despise links that open in a new window. Firefox used to be able to prevent it by tweaking a setting, but for some reason they removed that in Firefox 1.0.

Now it instead has a somewhat similar feature that can make target="_blank" open in a new tab instead, but that also makes popups open in a new tab. It's a change for the worse. I'm hoping someone makes an extension that brings back the old functionality.

I want to control my own browser, thankyouverymuch. Don't force your preferences on me by opening a new browser window when I don't want to.

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