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Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News open links in a new tab?

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Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News open links in a new tab?

#31

Post by simonblack »

r2b2 wrote: post #18
simonblack wrote: post #15

Middle-Click...Middle-Click...Middle-Click...Middle-Click...Middle-Click That's the wheel, for you guys coming from a two-button-mouse Operating System.

Which OS doesn't support multi-button mice?

The Apple MAC mice only had one button.

Windows mice only had two buttons.

The UNIX OSs used 3 button mice right from the start.

When browsers became more widespread, it became more usual to add a scroll-wheel to the two-button mice. But most Windows users didn't twig that the wheel as well as being scrollable, was also clickable. Probably that was because at that time very little software for Windows had the capability of using a 3-button mouse.

UNIX users had the reverse problem. They were used to their mice not being scrollable, so they were very confused when their middle-clicks were also scrolling the mouse (thus moving the cursor) so they were sometimes clicking on the wrong thing.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News open links in a new tab?

#34

Post by leighfuu »

paperpunk wrote: post #12

We had a spirited debate about this in our application at work recently. Some devs feel (strongly) that having no option to open links on the same page is a user-hostile choice. Other devs feels (also strongly) that users most likely want to open a link in a new tab so that’s what should happen. We never reached an agreement but someone did make a claim, that I was unable to verify, that modern users don’t use the ba…

Someone most definitely made that up.

Sadly I've wasted many hours of life in focus groups watching the mob navigate. Back buttons are *used prodigiously, and woe betide anyone who breaks a gesture swipe back - that one gets scowls.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News open links in a new tab?

#35

Post by fsflover »

ziml77 wrote: post #25
marssaxman wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac OS too, if your mouse has a middle button - I use it all the time.

And there's utilities that can give the trackpad a three finger click to act as the middle mouse button. I'm not sure I'd be able to tolerate a MacBook without that.

On GNU/Linux this is the default.

Re: Ask HN: Why doesn't Hacker News open links in a new tab?

#38

Post by bluejellybean »

I use middle mouse click, thumb mouse click, control click, and right mouse click + left click on "open in new tab".

Each method is dependent upon various things including, how I'm sitting, number of items I plan to open, number of comment sections vs just article link, and most importantly, how sore my hands are. Some methods are faster but strain my wrist more than I care to do, so I do those sparingly.

One of the reasons I love this site is the UI, it's very simple and gets out of the way for you. If you want to change the opening mechanism to only do new tabs, you are completely able to do so with code.

To answer your question, there are a variety of reasons why HN may choose to do it this way, other sites have different reasons so you see different site behavior.

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