Forcing links to open in new windows: an argument that should have ended

Not sure what the point would be… Besides the offender's unwarranted sense of entitlement (by keeping you around against your will), the main issue is that it breaks the back button. 15 years later, it's still an unwarranted sense of entitlement, and it's still breaking the back button. End of story, no?

If anything, we can an extra issue and suggest it's even worse nowadays. Per parent, it gobbles RAM on mobile devices, and this leads other tabs to close prematurely. It also turns older devices into helicopters when the fan kicks in.

But if you really need one, here's a study:

Date: just now. Author: yours truly. Methodology: browse random news websites every now and then on an old laptop and on an old mobile device. Sample: yours truly. Results: far too much cursing to publish as a HN comment, and frequent rage against the punk designers who ship huge JS payloads. Conclusion: it still sucks. :-)

Disagree, with an if/else: When the site is a set of links aggregated (Twitter, FB, Hacker News) I would prefer that the link open a new tab.

When it's a blog or a news site or anything else, the link should just be a link.

I had no idea that Blackberries ship with a dedicated "open link in new tab" physical button.

> Not sure what the point would be…

"In God we trust, all others must bring data." Best practices should be grounded in data rather than opinions whenever possible, especially when they're based on claims about users' cognitive load like in the NN/g recommendations.

> Per parent, it gobbles RAM on mobile devices, and this leads other tabs to close prematurely. It also turns older devices into helicopters when the fan kicks in.

I don't find that to be true with mobile devices. I much prefer having my links on mobile opening in a new tab, because a) mobile internet connection can be unreliable (and often a much bigger problem than lack of RAM), so I may not still have reception when trying to reload the original page, b) slow page loads makes browsing not as enjoyable since transitions take time, so I'd rather have everything in separate tabs and c) being on the move means I often put my phone down to do something else, so I don't necessarily remember every tab's browsing history.

Besides, mobile browsers have gotten a lot better at managing RAM and most have been able to optimize background tabs for a long time, so I think the RAM issue is way overrated.

> Besides the offender's unwarranted sense of entitlement (by keeping you around against your will), the main issue is that it breaks the back button. 15 years later, it's still an unwarranted sense of entitlement, and it's still breaking the back button.

I can see several reasons except for "unwarranted sense of entitlement" for this practice. It's all about reasonable expectations on the users' end: if a user can reasonably expect the website will behave some way, then not doing it this way can be detrimental to him. For example, many people expect "help" links (like the one next to the HN comment box) to not make you leave the page and rely on the "back" function to restore your painfully typed comment once you realize it does. They may be wrong in expecting this, but this seems like a perfectly rational safeguard against accidental data loss, so going against this could very well "increase the user's cognitive load".

As for the breaking the back button, my previous point was that the back button is not as important anymore, in part because a) a lot of things break the back button because dynamic content has made it much easier to do so and b) multi-tabbed browsing is now widespread and users may not be as confused by the fact each window/tab has its own browsing history anymore.

There are plenty of contradicting effects (precisely the reason why you and I can legitimately feel different about this issue) and the point of doing an actual study is to be able to measure them so we can compare them and say which trade-offs are worth it and which aren't.

tl;dr: your snark is unwelcome

I agree that the Web is regressing on this as certain players have consolidated players and decided they can get away with it... I think all the Gawker blogs de-evolved some time ago.