1506628 - [RFE] Add permission for link targets to open a new window / new tab

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement, P5)

Description

[Richard Körber]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Fedora; Linux x86_64; rv:63.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/63.0

Steps to reproduce:

Some web sites are opening an exceeding number of new windows/tabs while being visited. While this is reasonable and desired for some web sites, it can become a nuisance on other web sites.

For this reason, there should be a permission that, if denied for an individual web site, forces all links to open in the same window/tab.

Example: Visit booking.com, search for a city, then just click on a number of random hotels in the search result.


Actual results:

Each hotel is opened in a new tab. After a while, the user ends with a large number of open tabs, which is pretty annoying. All those tabs need to be closed manually again.


Expected results:

In the "Permissions" preferences, the user should be able to select an option that prohibits this individual web site from opening new windows/tabs by itself.

Now, if the user clicks on a hotel, Firefox forces the link to open in the current tab.

If the user wants to open the link in a new tab or new window, she/he can still use the "open link in new tab" and "open link in new window" context menu items. However it is now the user's decision again, whether a new tab is opened or the current tab is used.

Comment 1

[Dão Gottwald [:dao]]

There's already a preferences that covers part of this: "Open links in tabs instead of new windows."

Comment 2

[Adrian Roselli]

I second this request.

From an accessibility perspective, new windows/tabs can be problematic for users and have been cited as such since the release of WCAG 1.0 in 1999 and are referenced in a number of WCAG 2.x documents including Success Criterion 3.2.5: Change on Request and supporting documents such as F22, H83, SCR24, G200, and G201.

We also know that links with target="_blank" attributes that lack rel=noopener and/or rel=noreferrer presents a security risk to users.

Without developers taking care to consider all contexts and address security issues in their implementations then a core feature of the web (the hyperlink) is both a usability and security risk.

The browser can mitigate this by making it a setting users can control. It can also make this part of a larger enterprise policy setting, allowing organizations the ability to provide additional security in their environments.

Comment 3

[Richard Körber]

Now Amazon has started to use target="_blank" on some of its internal links too, forcing me to have multiple Amazon tabs open even though I only want to have a single Amazon tab.

I could mitigate the problem by setting "browser.link.open_newwindow=1" and "browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction=0" (see http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow and http://kb.mozillazine.org/Browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction). However, this would affect all sites, while the behaviour is actually desired on some web sites.

Please make it possible to set a "browser.link.open_newwindow=1" and "browser.link.open_newwindow.restriction=0" effect individually on some web sites. As more and more web sites contract the target="_blank" disease, this would really be a killer feature! Thank you!