some people that are not into computers and web and do not organize their tabs and articles in new tabs for gathering informations for the near future. I’m not sure garbage is quite fair. What should developers do with their links? For myself, I will ignore your “Bad Reasons” since I’d rather close a tab than hit the back button. So as you’re reading, I’m referring to an other source. There are some reasons why we might want to break that behavior, and we can go over those, but for most links, we don’t. Though i dont use Taget=”_blank” but i was thinking to go for it. And hopefully, your calm and educated approach will help your client feel good about you. I say everybody, but only those who deemed it necessary that a non-JavaScript user (possibly visually impaired considering the time this implementation happened) be forced to have another window open when following a link. Whether or not it was right for that to be tradition in the first place is a different discussion, but as it stands I expect external links to open in a new window. “Reading an article”, in my opinion, doesn’t qualify here. The decision was made to send them to a new window so that the user’s session isn’t interrupted, and so they don’t see a message triggered by window.onbeforeunload. As far as PDFs are concerned, I’m 50/50 on that one. If the user is interested in a specific technology and clicks the link, she or he will not lose the reading position and gets additional information in parallel. Why do they close the page they were on? Making him pressing the back button a gazillion times then is supposed to be a good UI decision? - reek/anti-adblock-killer Glad someone brought out the Nielsen quote. Several years of closely observing users during training sessions has shown me that: 1) many users don’t right click, ever (so would never see the context menu in their browser), 2) most users don’t know about middle-clicking or Ctrl-clicking or [Meta-key]-clicking a link, 3) many users are pretty comfortable hitting the “Back” button in their browser, but are also pretty comfortable closing a window or tab, and get pretty confused when they occassionally close a window or tab at the inappropriate time (when target=”_blank” was not used). We still use _blank quite often for a lot of reasons you named “bad”. In my experience, from user feedback and user research, they want these external links to open in a new tab. Let’s take it from the top: _self: [default] – Loads the page into the same “HTML5 browsing context” (tab, or window — browser/user preference I guess) as the current one. Imagine if clicking a link in outlook opened IE and closed outlook. As many have already pointed out, this mechanic is arguably considered an industry standard. links in the footer) have normal behavior, but we detect if you have unsaved changes in the editor and prompt you to save them before you leave. But in my experience when a user clicks a link to an external site, they expect a new tab, and automatically close that tab when they are finished with the external content. Since it’s (generally) so easy to get back to (most browsers even scroll down to where you were), there is no risk of real loss, and readers are really skimmers anyway. "_blank" guarantees that the window/tab will be new. So is UX a matter of what’s best in an ideal world, or what’s best for our real users ? I just don’t want to ignore the impacts that others left on this page. Perhaps a small arrow beneath the timeline that was like a “You’ve watched this video this far before” link. It seems everyone here is discussing which is more “wrong”, new tab or same tab. Basecamp has since changed that, probably due to a lot of complaints. You don’t have to go back yourself, the tab you were on stays open, and you can continue browsing if you want to. Unfortunately in the latter scenario, the opinion of the Directors and their wishes far outweighs that of the front-end dev! I really don’t see why this has to be such a personal mission for some of you to let people know how much you hate us using target=”_blank” if it is valid and works. But my feeling is very much as Paul says that target=”_blank” is a bit of a shiboleth that “really doesn’t present much of an issue for a majority of visitors”. Especially since we have a lot of directory functions that link out to other websites, as well as references to federal guidelines and forms hosted on federal government sites. You don’t have to reload the original page, or worry about losing your spot. Thanks as always :), Can you please share your idea, weather to keep or not. Every site I reference, references a lot of other sources in turn and so on. I know where I came from, so how did the browser lose track? _top: – Loads the page into the top-level browsing context, which means “the whole page” in a situation where you have nested frames. Wel, IMHO, if i’m reading an article and it has an link for further reading in a subject, it should open in new window. You understand that normal style links are ideal, but if that means a user leaves your site, you’re willing to break that ideal. It should come as a final solution, not an immediate or even secondary one. My clients and a LOT of internet users are used to it. If they didn’t want it, we would get rid of that behavior. But I’ll bet you’ll be hard-pressed to find a site built in the past decade with default blue links. But, I think having new windows in some cases is ok. Not across the board every external link on a site. If someone wants to use it – who cares? I find no good reason to use it, instead opting for Javascript in several ways. I think this makes sense, given that sharing links to external sites is a big feature of social networks. The default behavior is for links to open normally. Let’s get this crap straightened out — now, and hopefully next time: let’s start here: MDN Reference. 3) Changing the link behaviour based on a media state (playing or not) is also a horrible idea. My thought process was, since each website is a full fledged website on it’s own, sending someone there and having them click all around will make them forget where they came from. OpenWrt is translated into 40 languages using Weblate. that topic is very hard to handle. Perhaps having as little friction transitioning from video to video is important for them, but it would be nice if they offered a bit of help there. Thus, losing their spot in the reading. Data on this would indeed be interesting, but the fact is, as it seems, that both behaviours have their pros and cons, and both user preferences exist. That’s interesting Jason, and of course specific case user testing will always override general principles. For starters, using the download attribute. The related posts above were algorithmically generated and displayed here without any load on our servers at all, thanks to Jetpack. When the user hits play, would you add target=_blank to every link in the page? I guess some very specific split-window cross-reference thing could be a use case? We use cookies to make wikiHow great. _new is totally the right choice. It’s the developer’s decision to make, and the user’s decision to override. My experience was that popup blockers were blocking target=”_blank” and so I discovered window.open(this.href) and haven’t looked back. We’ve had this discussion around the office- I was in the mindset of ‘metrics metrics metrics’ that was mentioned in the article. Eyeballs baby. And the Back button? Perhaps this is one of the exceptions but I think I agree the user should know how to open a new tab or window by now. The other way to look at this is along the spectrum of how reputable the links may be. It’s unfortunate that no browser to my knowledge has chosen to support the guidelines for the ‘target-new’ property from the CSS3 Hyperlink Presentation Module, W3C Working Draft 24 February 2004: http://goo.gl/UbQn1a . This has happened with sighted and screen reader users. Oh my god Neave! The back button, even in a new tab, should close the tab and take you back to where you came from. However, I still feel like this is one of those age old “rules” that is always brought up as a best practice, that really doesn’t present much of an issue for a majority of visitors the way it is portrayed. That said, all points made about forcing behaviour onto users are completely valid, it’s just no use to try and battle reality with ideology. The only people who know about Ctrl+Click to open a new tab are probably the people commenting on this thread so I think I’m going to change my mind and go with new tab, although I can appreciate that some of the Good Examples at the top still stand the test. Links opening within the same page is the default behavior (as if the link had target="_self" on it). I honestly don’t know a single person who clicks a link when they’re in the middle of an article and doesn’t become frustrated when it doesn’t open in a new tab. A lot of this argument seems elitist in its approach. Chris, you are totally right. It must represent a philosophical difference. When I’m reading a long article that links to a different domain (and I wish to continue reading the article), I find it much easier to use a simple control-W keystroke to close a tab than trying to navigate back to the article I was reading. We went through this trying to submit liftie.info to Firefox marketplace. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other major social outlets use _blank linking as the default behavior. I have a basic rule of thumb I like to use… when changing context, new window. CSS-Tricks is created by Chris and a team of swell people. They must think so. I can also see how a link to an external site can sometimes be categorized as a self-serving ad. But in that case, I wonder if that was a UX choice or an advertising choice. Users EXPECTATION is that the link will be loaded. @ryan you are assuming they don’t. ** Yes I know there’s cmd + shift + T, but do you think someone who doesn’t know about the tab-click knows that? When that non-savvy user closes that window, they lose that whole session**. Especially here: What if I told you that most end-users have no idea they can open a new window with right click or middle click? Blanket rules are not the solution here. But now i wont do it. If you specify target to anything that isn’t one of those four values, it will open the page in a new tab/window who’s name will be your target value. That holds true for the client as well. It shouldn’t be done everywhere, but the idea that it’s always, or nearly always, bad behaviour is simply wrong. This is related to the above two reasons, only perhaps worse. Regardless of 1 or 2 the presence of a dialogue in lieu of the expected event may simply CONFUSE the user. Why does opening a link in a new tab break the back button?