373978 - Left clicking a link should never open new tabs or windows

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: Tabbed Browser, enhancement)

Description

[Ivan Ičin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070309 Minefield/3.0a3pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a3pre) Gecko/20070309 Minefield/3.0a3pre

Currently, web developers (with aid from the browsers) treat users as very stupid beings, so that they are not wise enough to decide when to open link in the same or in the new tab.

I think that it is perfectly normal to think that if user left clicked it is safe to suppose that he wanted link to be opened in the same tab, and if he middle clicked, that he wanted link to be opened into new tab, and that Firefox should follow user command and *ignore* what web developer thinks is right.

The exception could be javascript pop-ups that resize window, as this is something that user cannot decide, and it is reasonable to follow web developer's decision concerning this.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Ben Basson]

Steps to reproduce:
1. Left click a link
2. Guess if it'll load a new tab or load in the current tab
3. If you guess wrong and it annoys you, you've hit this bug

The web is littered with the use of so called "external" links that force-open in "new windows" or tabs (courtesy of target="_blank" and friends). Suppressing this behaviour for left clicks and forcing links to open in the _current_ tab only would make for a more consistent user experience. Users have ample ways to open new tabs if they so desire.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I don't think it's that easy. You might actually break some web forms and apps if implementing the requested behaviour. Simply ignoring a web developers decision to let things open not in the same tab does not seem like it could ever become default behaviour.

At best, I think this could be a pref with or without pref UI. Otherwise, perhaps it's wontfix and you'd need an extension to do this for you.

Comment 3

[Ivan Ičin]

(In reply to comment #2)
> I don't think it's that easy. You might actually break some web forms and apps
> if implementing the requested behaviour. Simply ignoring a web developers
> decision to let things open not in the same tab does not seem like it could
> ever become default behaviour.
> 
> At best, I think this could be a pref with or without pref UI. Otherwise,
> perhaps it's wontfix and you'd need an extension to do this for you.

I remember that year or two ago I stumbled upon site that had problem with this. And I browse the web several hours a day.

Implementing this as something web site should depend on is a poor UI (e.g. it might have problem with many mobile browsers). If you really need something like that, it would be much better to use popup (and almost all sites do).

Let's compare this to pop-ups. Isn't disabling popus by default as every browser does something that could break many web sites (and actually it broken many at a time and sometimes still does)? But disabling popu-ups by default was one of the best decions Mozilla have ever made.

So life is not that simple. You don't have always win-win situaions, but rather you usually should chose a better trade off. So yes, disabling popus broke some sites that were programmed to show useful information in popup, but still it enhanced user experience so much, that it was worth it.

On the other hand, this options seems so much more safe - it breaks sites just in theory, and enhances user experience.

Comment 4

[Jasmine Miller]

Attachment: same problem

Thanks from fapcposdeli1970.