If I want to open that site in a tab I just use Ctrl+click or middle-click. That way I'm in control of where the link opens and not the site. Much better.

target="_blank" is one of the worst thing of the old web. Frames may be the first in this ranking. Surprisingly enough, the two are related: the 'target' attribute primary goal is to manage frames.

As others said, as the whole web developer community says actually, one shouldn't use such thing that forces the users to open a new tab. You should give them the freedom of choosing whether they want to open this new tab, because it's very easy for them to do so: middle-clicking or ctrl-clicking.

Please do some basic web searching; you'll find pretty soon that people have been fighting against this attribute for too long to let a techy-oriented website like HN implement this.

HackerNews [sic], I dare you to allow your users to choose how they want to open new links, even if the mouse/keyboard mechanism for opening them in new tabs isn't completely 100% intuitive to some subset of web users.

I dare you to ignore any so-called "SEO" who thinks he's discovered an incredible "engagement" technique that's really just another tired way of tricking people into staying on your website.

I dare you to consult the relevant RFCs and acknowledge that the behavior of target="_blank" isn't news to anyone here.

I dare you to recognize that not every single thing on the internet has to "optimized" to get more traffic, and that "engagement" isn't just about people clicking on links.

I dare you to consider the possibility that we now have a situation where, thanks to the SEO frenzy of the past few years, there is no "correct" default behavior for links anymore, and it might be better to just let the user have control over it via their browser preferences.

I dare you to tell the world which way you prefer to open links and why it is better.

What say you? WHAT SAY YOU?

I don't know what SEO-flavored koolaid you've been gargling, but FYI, the Back button is _still_ the most-used part of browser UI, beating out even _the address bar_: https://blog.mozilla.org/ux/2012/06/firefox-heatmap-study-20...

I'd think "techies like yourself" would also know that there are also at least four ways to open any link you want in a new tab: ctrl-click, middle-click, context menu, or ctrl-enter while it has focus.

As for the Back button, I tend to have one hand on my mouse while browsing anyway (so I can, you know, click links), and I usually go back by clicking mouse4. That's the bottom of the pair of buttons on the left side of the mouse, where my thumb goes. The top one, mouse5, even goes forward. I think this is default behavior in every browser by now.

Opening in a new window by default is a crappy idea anyway, but it's particularly bad on a news aggregator site line HN, because I almost certainly want to read _more than one article_. Why would I click a link and alt-tab back ad nauseum, when I can just scan down the front page and middle-click anything that looks interesting, then browse through the collection of new tabs at my leisure?

The only remotely compelling excuse for this behavior is that users may not know how to open links in new tabs, but they absolutely understand Back, and one would assume HN has a reasonably technical audience anyway. So that just leaves us with: spawning new tabs forces me to look at the origin site at least once more so I can _close_ it. Well, fuck your cheap tricks and fuck your "engagement". I'll do my own window management, tyvm.

Since the links time out so fast you're kind of forced to go a few pages deep in 1 shot while opening links that you want to read in a new tab then read them when you can.

There's some weird satisfaction of not middle clicking the last link you plan to read for now and depart from HN for that session.

I hate to use keyboard shortcuts for opening links in new tabs. This SHOULD be a default feature on a site like HN.