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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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.

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.

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