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Comment by MatekCopatek | Hacker News Reader

> Trying to be helpful by automatically doing stuff I don't necessarily want.

Wholeheartedly agree. My #1 personal pet peeve that fits this description is links that automatically open in new windows/tabs.

You might (correctly) assume that most people want to open certain links (e.g. document previews) in a new tab, but that doesn't mean you need to force it upon them. Let them decide if they want to click with the left or the middle button.

Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?

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> Do you really think there are people out there who read your website, click on a regular link and then go "Damn, it opened in the same window. I guess that thing I was reading is gone ¯\_(ツ)_/¯"?

Sample of one, but yes

Facebook does this. Their links open in the same window, but nuke the back history. I've clicked a FB link multiple times and then tried to go back and was justifiably confused (at first) and then upset (every time after).

Are you using FB container in Firefox? This would be a known side-effect.

That must be it! Now that I know it's Firefox protecting me, and not Facebook trying to trap me, I'm thrilled! Although from a UI perspective that should have been more obvious to me.

Similar to doing ctrl+s five times in a row on a document, this pattern leads to the new anxiety driven UX of right clicking a link and carefully selecting “open in new tab”.

Sometimes I absolutely do not go back. If I'm the middle of filling out a complex form e.g., and a link nukes the form history. If it wasn't that important to me I might not go back and refill it.

I hold control down on every link that I click, because I'm so gun-shy about never being able to return to the point that I departed from in the modern SPA-ified web.

If things were still boring server-side HTML pages like geocities in 2000, I might be more trusting.

This is IMO a browser bug. Browsers should allow users to choose "always open in new tabs" or "always open in the same tab" as a default, with modifier + click performing the opposite action, in a way that websites can’t override.

The underlying issue is that tabs were bolted onto existing browsers at some point, and no mainstream browser was designed from the ground up with tabs in mind. As a result, the details of many previously existing features which interact with tabs were never revisited.

I really wish there was a right click option for "Open link in this tab"

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