Back in the day, I used to hate websites that insisted on opening all links in new tabs, as if I actually wanted to stay on a particular site, and wasn’t blithely skipping across the web like a flat rock on a river. And indeed, in 2012, people seemed to generally agree: Can outbound links open in a new tab?
But time and conventions change, and nowadays, when I visit a web site, I expect it to stay in its tab until I close that tab, and if it points me to something else, I expect that to open in a new tab. Which means that since that’s not how intfiction.org works, I’ll often be reading something here, it’ll point to something interesting, I’ll go read it, close that tab… and realize that I no longer have my intfiction tab any more, because I had to click ‘back’ instead of ‘close’ to return.
Those are my own sensibilities, though–do other people think a switch to ‘open in a new tab by default’ would be useful for this forum?
Oh, yeah, I can right-click-and-open-in-new-tab everywhere, I’ve just been trained on every other web site I visit to not need it for ‘these kinds’ of links.
