196971 - The user should be warned that clicking a link will open a new window

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 14027

(SeaMonkey :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Karl Eklund]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030310
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.3) Gecko/20030310

Opening new windows is really something that should be done by the user, not by
the web page author, because the window is the form in which the information is
displayed, it is not part of that information. As the web is it's often
impossible to predict whether new windows will open or not. It's not right.

Ideally, browsers wouldn't have the functionality to open new windows on the
request of web page authors. But since so many web pages depend on that
functionality, it's not possible to remove support for it. Or is it?

Another solution is to warn the user that the web page will be opened in a new
window, perhaps in the status bar like in Konqueror: "[url] (opens in new window)".

Also, users that use tabbed browsing might like links that are for new windows
to open in tabs instead of in new windows.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:

Comment 1

[Matthias Versen [:Matti]]

sorry but that is part of the DOM standard and we will not remove this !
Opening in a new tab is a dupe of another bug..

You can see the link target (javascript:blah) unless they use a onclick to open
the window. And you can deny the status bar overwriting in the prefs.

wontfix ?

Comment 2

[Karl Eklund]

OK. I didn't really mean that removing the functionality was realistic.

Yes, if it opens with Javascript you see it in the status bar but what if new
windows are opened with the "target" attribute? Then there is no warning. I
think Konqueror will tell about it in the status bar in that case.

Comment 3

[Jason Bassford]

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 14027 ***