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Comment by throwaway8581 | Hacker News Reader

>And when I command-click those buttons they don't open in a new tab.

One of my greatest annoyances. I’m an open in new tab guy. When I see this annoying pattern I end up clicking, middle clicking the back button (only possible on desktop), then switching the tab positions, so I can get the correct outcome.

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> middle clicking the back button

TIL, apparently. Also, middle-clicking refresh opens a new copy of the current page. So much for GUIs being discoverable. Thanks.

To be fair, your browser probably has a history menu option in the top menu that opens a sidebar with your recent history. You can probably right click the top page and click “open in a new tab”. This is highly discoverable and does the same thing (just in more steps). You can also select the text in your URL bar, right click and copy, then open a new tab the usual way and paste the URL there. Also the same results but highly discoverable with extra steps.

As far as I know highly discoverable means there is no hidden functionality, not that every shortcut is advertised.

I’m a regular laptop user and I often use this trick. In Windows you can ctrl+click the back button to pop open a tab for the previous url, I’d guess command+clicking the back button does the same on a Mac.

Thanks. I didn’t know that. I usually just map three finger tap to middle click.

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