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Comment by river_styx | Hacker News Reader

Please don't make this change. My #1 pet peeve on the web is a page that opens new browser windows.

maybe it could be a preference. i personally run a greasemonkey script that not only opens links in a new tab, but inserts a topbar so i can vote and get to comments from the article page.

First thing I thought was "greasemonkey" when I read this. But the extra features of your script sound pretty sweet. Is it online somewhere?

Try Hacker News OnePage for Greasemonkey. I love it so far.

http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512

I agree. I use the scroll button to open links in new tabs, but sometimes I really want to open a page in the same tab.

This is only seconded by links that are something like: <a href="javascript:void(0);" onclick="someStuff();">

I sure do love opening a tab for javascript:void(0).

just curious, why?

I mean this isnt 5 years ago and sites are opening obtrusive windows that fill up the taskbar and ruin your history

It's just annoying. If I want to open a new window, I'll do that myself by cmd-clicking or some variant of that.

Correct. Best practices are that you do not force your users into any particular browsing habit. Keep it consistent and do not open things in _blank that do not absolutely require it.

There are a million tools for users to control their browsing experience ... in the browser. Do not force it in your application.

> Best practices are that you do not force your users into any particular browsing habit.

Agreed. Is there a plugin in Firefox that ignores target directives and does it the way I want?

Try Tab Mix Plus

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1122

It has a whole bunch of features, one of which is to force all links to open in the current tab.

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