Ask HN: Please AWS team, make links work with control-click | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Please AWS team, make links work with control-click

144 pointseridal37 comments

Hey AWS team,

If you are reading this, please please make CTRL-click to open a new page. It's really frustrating to try to open a link in a new page just to see that the page navigated, and then if you click the back button, you end up nowhere near where you were before.

I really love the new UI, it's really good! and with this feature we could be more productive and use AWS even more!!

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Websites breaking core functionality is mildly infuriating but Google Drive's desktop app disables CMD+C (copy to clipboard) on MacOS. And this is in a window whose sole purpose is to provide a sharable link to the user.

You read that right. A "native" app over-riding core operating system functionality to prevent users performing the very task the window is designed for.

Let that sink in for a moment.

(Since the window is a webview you can see (and debug) the JS code doing it. They are aware of the problem but not interested in fixing it.)

Please $SITE, stop breaking $BASIC_FUNCTIONALITY.

In Firefox, you can often avoid various hijacking by holding Shift.

or scrollclick in any browser.

But not any website :(

I've seen this on a few sites, my suspicion is that it's caused by some kind of marketing analytics JavaScript that attempts to track clicks on outbound links by intercepting the click, logging the analytic event and then navigating to the destination using location.href=something.

Not sure what's causing it here - could be Marketo Munchkin perhaps?

I believe it's that javascript apps built without due care and consideration don't use true links, they use onclick handlers.

This. I've been guilty of it, because sometimes it makes sense if you're in a hurry and want to add clever functionality (for example, make the whole row of a table be a "link"). Only to be overtly frustrated when you try to use the the app yourself. I'll wheel-click a table row and curse myself for not have thought that before.

It's probably more just that sites are using SPA frameworks that use onClicks in JS instead of hrefs in HTML. Can't control click a link that isn't a link, it's a span pretending to be a link.

In which case I wonder if the burden can be placed with the browser.

Control click on opens a new tab with identical state and executes the click there.

Yeah, I saw that too. But I used Segment's analytics.js [0] several years ago and they solved this problem. Other companies should take a look at analytics.js and fix their scripts.

[0] https://segment.com/docs/sources/website/analytics.js/

Yeah I mean you can technically still let the middle click work if you let middle click event propagate and send analytics... maybe they just were lazy.

I can confirm that Omniture (or Adobe Whatever-It's-Called now) definitely used to break right-clicking on links; I know this because we integrated it into a site and it broke right-clicking on links, and then when I turned Omniture off irritably one day, hey presto, they started working again.

Oh jesus, Today I was messing around with Athena and S3, very cool product btw. In the new s3 control panel, I was having the hardest time selecting the bucket and path I was on so I could copy it. Its 2017, wtf?

The new UI is uneccessary and incomplete. The old UI was a fine flat, plain design ala Goole. The new UI lacks many features of the old and feels more clunky; it should not have been enabled yet.

I just re-wrote some navigation on a single page app personal project and this post reminded me that I'd definitely broken this functionality. So, thanks very much!

For those with a similar problem, the fix is super easy: https://github.com/marcusdarmstrong/mockdraftable-web/commit...

Ugh. Need a hall of shame for this.

Links are the essence of the web (HTML and HTTP).

I have this exact problem with Microsoft Azure as well. Changing pages always takes 5-10 seconds and you can't open in a new tab to open new tables concurrently. Makes working in their portal really inefficient.

Azure has probably the worst UI ever created...

Microsoft's new(er) Outlook web version puts a Windows phone 8 style back button on the screen, and disables your actual back button. I know they put a lot of effort into the design of this metro stuff, I can't understand it.

AKA lol Angular. Curmudgeonly amusing that a team in charge of ads on the web builds a product that requires so much care to make something as basic as the link continue to work.

It's not difficult at all to write Angular apps where links can be opened in new tabs. I would imagine the same is true for all the major SPA frameworks.

I've built several angular apps and I've never had this issue in any of my applications. So no, while it's so popular to shame Angular lately this isn't an Angular problem.

Are you sure Angular breaks links by default?

I've only dabbled, but it's never seemed like that's been a problem.

Try right-click > open in new tab. Nobody traps right-click in JS :]

Yes, unbelievably annoying, but I've encountered this kind of behavior on a lot of websites.

An increasing number of websites force me to right-click to follow links; maybe JS can't trap it yet? In some places, the basic process to follow a link has become right-click, copy link, paste into text editor, filter URL through script to remove tracking crap, open new tab, paste result into URL bar.

Web 3.0, baby!

JS can trap right-click, at least in certain situations; for example, if you right-click in gmail, it brings up a HTML menu, not the OS-native one.

In this case, my current workaround is to duplicate the tab then continue from there.

That is your lucky enough to have be a real link :/

It's JavaScript ruining the world

Every UI for every product is managed independently by each product team, if you look at the source, some are angular, some are plain HTML and some are backbone.

the only place it doesn't work for me is S3, and if I remember correctly s3 has always worked liked this, it's not the new ui specifically.

Haha I go through this problem when I'm in S3

they updated s3 recently.. sadly not solving the problem

Did that update solve any problems? Other than perhaps for someone who didn't like accessing advanced properties like object metadata? Or maybe people just really wanted a too dark blue color scheme? I switched back to the old after giving it a try and getting frustrated; wasn't ready for prime time.

use the api (which is also not perfect)

The title sounds like you can please the AWS team by making links ctrl-clickable.

Grammatically, that would require a semicolon.

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