Beware of Opening Links in a New Window

[Michel Merlin]

(Thu 13 Aug 2009 14:28 GMT)
There is a possible solution, and that is to go to a redirect page.

This would just add gratuitous unstandard complications, and cripple the standard navigation (redirections, among other destructions, destroy the "new" or "visited" colors - that users need and love as much as webmasters misunderstand, hate and kill).

Better act simply, logically and clearly, like visitors are expecting, as I recalled Sun 4 Feb 2007 22:38 GMT in Chose carefully Same or New window, then let User change easily above.

Versailles, Thu 13 Aug 2009 18:50:00 +0200

[Stevie D]

There is a possible solution, and that is to go to a redirect page. It could say 'you are navigating away from the site, do you want to open the link in a new window instead?' which a 'remember option' button. An alternative is to have a similar page but it shows the page in an iframe. This is one of the only places where iframes come in handy.

Remind me never to visit your website.....

If I click a link, I want to browse to that page. I don't want a warning to come up that I'm about to leave one website, and then a popup to let me know there's about to be a popup, and then a Windows dialog box asking me to confirm that I want to follow the link...

If I want to open a link in a new window, I will open it in a new window. I can do that as and when I want to. The majority of web surfers know how to do that.

As the majority of web surfers are not sufficiently enlightened as to use Opera, if you have specified a new window then they cannot override that. Forcing users to use your browsing model rather than allowing them to use their own is arrogant, unhelpful and likely to put people off using your site.

[Stomme poes]

The majority of web surfers know how to do that.

Is this true? If it is, then the whole article and whinging over target=blank is moot, isn't it? I thought the danger (the only danger, the only problem) was that a new window when unexpected does harm to the user. But if most web surfers know how to set their browsers the change new-window to new-tab, or understand what's happened, then we can't argue there's any damage at all.

Now our current fire dept site is awful, and here's why:
half the links open in new windows, which in my setup are full-screen and completely cover the old window, fooling me. My only sign is my back arrow isn't highlighted anymore.

But the other half of the links are just straight links. So after getting in the habit of opening new windows and then hitting the close button to "go back" (because I don't have new-tab set up in my browser, I'm much too lazy), I then get into a series of accidentally closing my entire browser because I'd just gotten well-trained like a rat to close the "new windows". Grrr.

At least if you pick one, don't mix styles. That's so much worse than just all new windows, really.

Off Topic:

As the majority of web surfers are not sufficiently enlightened as to use Opera...

I would be enlightened but the continual meditation on which buttons on my keyboard do what is too much for me, I was trained in my little cage with Tab buttons. Tab is my friend now. This ctrl-a ctrl-c stuff just gets mixed up in my head, and my alt key was stolen away by greedy Gnomes on Ubuntu.

Though I met someone recently who actually wrote a Perl script that remaps all his keys to his own personal choices every time he gets a new Opera proto-alpha or whatever they're called before they're released to the public as "alpha" (he tests Opera).