Comments on: Why External Links Should Open in New Tabs

By: Arpit Agarwal

Arpit Agarwal — Fri, 08 Jan 2021 06:56:04 +0000

Thanks a ton for breaking down things…

But I’ve a question, you told that external links opening in same tab will curb the data and website loads…, which is correct…. but don’t you think, it would affect the same when you open the internal links in the same tab?

Please, let me know.

Thanks,
Arpit

By: Manuel g

Manuel g — Wed, 06 Feb 2019 21:06:26 +0000

This is by far the worst post I have read in a long time. ALL links should open in a new tab jesus, even the worst marketer knows that. How silly is to force the user to navigate no a new page leaving the actual one.

By: sandy

sandy — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 16:54:58 +0000

Think of it this way, your breaking browser functionality. By using tabs you are forcing people to have more tabs than they might want. If we go back even further spyware and generally bad things opened new browser windows. This is still common practice. So what you are doing is breaking browser functionality and causing things to sporadically open. For most of us that causes an instant reaction of closing tabs. Then we get out of that website because it did something we didn’t expect. Also we know it’s a sale or sponsored content and avoid everything else on that page. Beyond that advertisement blockers generally remove all links that open new windows and tabs.

So not only are you causing a bad reaction for 50% of your users, your content isn’t even linked if they have an ad blocker. It’s just a bad practice. Those of us who are smart enough can open tabs when we want. The rest can use a back button it’s not that difficult.

By: gib

gib — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 17:23:22 +0000

Some great points here. I generally lean toward allowing the user to decide with Ctrl/Command + click as others have suggested.

By: John

John — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 22:32:35 +0000

YES! Thank you! It’s so unbelievably annoying that site managers don’t do this! I finally looked up how to open in a new window by default as a user, (the whole CMD/CTRL + click.. but how stupid do you have to be to not know how annoying this is?

I’ve been having to click, copy paste, open a new tab, paste link into new tab, go back to the old tab and hit the back button.

So annoying. Luckily, I won’t be doing that anymore.