The Scientific Method
While we were building out the new iMarc website, a colleague and I had a vehement disagreement over link behavior. There is a link to the Newburyport Chamber of Commerce on the about page, and my esteemed colleague Karin wanted it to open in a new window — because when she opens a link leading off any site, she wants a new window to preseve her old one. I argued that this would be user-unfriendly because it changed the state of the user's window manager — and further, that anyone who wanted that behavior was sophisticated enough to create the behavior on demand.
We couldn't reach agreement, so I filed a bug report ("Dragonfly Issue #11647"), and asked Dave, the project manager, to determine and apply best practice.
Dave resolved the issue by running an experiment with an actual user. Following is his update in the bug report:
I just switched it to open in a new window then watched my Mom use the site. Here's what happened:
- She went to the About page and clicked on the Chamber link
- Like 80% of the world, she's on a PC and didn't notice that it opened a new window
- After 2 seconds on the Chamber page, she realized that she wasn't interested and wanted to get back to iMarc.
- She clicked the back button but — because it was a new window — the back button didn't work. (She actually got quite frustrated after clicking the back button a couple times).
- She ended up going to Google and typing imarc.net in the search field. She clicked the first result and went to our home page. Then she clicked on "About" to get back to where she was.
Through all this, she never realized that the About page was still behind the new window.
I switched it back to a regular link so we don't break the back button.
Best bug report ever.
Comments
When somebody who's signing my checks asks me to make their links automatically open in a new window, the scenario you describe above is pretty much the same scenario I describe to them as 'my professional opinion.' I ask them to consider what happens when the user aims for the Back button and it doesn't work...
On the flip-side, there probably are a few cases where automatically opening a link in a new window is ideal, but in my 9+ years of developing for the web, I've never come across one.
Our issue tracker has a user option to open issue links in a new window. I can't remember if that's enabled by default, but that's one good use case.
Imagine if it were default browser behavior to open all links in a new window. I'm going to mention that the next time someone suggests that interaction.
Ironically enough, I've typed this comment three times. If this page had opened in a new window, I wouldn't have had to retype my comment so many times, because I wouldn't have been able to navigate anywhere.
"After 2 seconds on the Chamber page, she realized that she wasn't interested and wanted to get back to iMarc."
Therein lies my favorite argument for opening links in the same window.
Read something more recent.
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Visitors
Your key point says it all: "anyone who wanted that behavior was sophisticated enough to create the behavior on demand"
My favorite are sites that go to such great lengths to produce open in a new-window-links that they make it impossible for you to right-click and choose "open in new tab". (Generally due to a Javascript pseudo-link...)