I'm not sure exactly how I came to be the unofficial spokesgal for opening new windows, but as one of the few developers who's taken the pro stance I guess I'm stuck with the label for now.

In theory...

To clarify my own position, I actually consider myself to be somewhere in the middle ground of all this in theory.

Frankly, I don't think either side's solution is ideal. Opening new windows is clearly an aggravation to the tech savvy, but I've also watched as non-geeks who've used the Internet for years painstakingly open a new browser window from their start menu or task bar, then either re-navigate to the item they wanted in the new window or copy and paste the URL from the original window before they resume browsing.

"Let me control my own browsing." That's an entirely legitimate argument. If I force open a new window you can't stop it. I hear ya.

I do not, however, buy into the "if you want users to come back to your site provide content worth coming back for" argument. Not for one second. That's lazy thinking. Of course you want to provide great content, but that has no reasoned bearing on the discussion of whether we should be sending users to new windows to browse offsite content.

For starters, users who click offsite links are not necessarily trying to leave your site. They are reading your site and you have recommended they check out another site. Exactly where in that transaction do you think your users suddenly say to themselves, "Well you've suggested I check out Site Y, I must be done here..."? If people are consciously "done" with your site and have no plans for returning during that session, nothing is stopping them from typing a new URL right over the top of yours or moving to the next item in their favorites menu.

Surfing is a fluid activity and it is not at all uncommon for people to become distracted from their intended course. Now granted, I spend an obscene number of hours online compared to "regular" people, but in my own use, I would count in the dozens the number of sites which I find open on my desktop each day and say, 'Oh yeah I did want to .....' or 'Oh right I was looking for....'

Do you really think most people are so organized in their surfing that they follow out some predetermined plan step-by-step? 'Well, I'm done here, now I can move onto Site 2.' That they don't unintentionally follow links offsite and forget what they were doing? This happens. It happens a lot. And it doesn't matter how fabulous your content is. If I've clicked through to something else before I've finished with your fabulous content and your site is not sitting open on my desktop later, it could be weeks, months or all of eternity before I remember I wanted to read/buy/e-mail it.

Sorry, I had to get that out of my system. If I hear one more person spout out 'just make your content better' as a solution to anything I'm going to just go back to Vegas and triple my salary working as a cocktail waitress. Can we all just agree on that much? That 'have good content' should be the No. 1 goal of every Web site and therefore assume everyone who has any interest in having a good site is already working toward that (whether they're achieving it or not)?

In practice...

Getting back to the people with the legitimate complaint... I have a solution to propose.

It may not be the best solution possible and right now the coding only works in IE and Opera (it actually produces the exact opposite of the desired effect in Mozilla browsers for the obvious reason that I used 'Control' as the event key) so technically at this stage it's not even a correct solution but it's enough to give you the idea and perhaps some ambitious young coder will come up with a script that works universally before I have to try to figure out how to make it work myself (hey I have to have a little bit of a life, don't I?).

Offsite link

The idea is simple. I've shifted the burden of the learning curve from the inexperienced users who don't even know they have the option to so easily control their own browsing destiny onto the experienced users who very much want to do so.

If people can be expected to hold down an extra key when they want a link to open a new window, why not expect them to hold down an extra key to NOT open a new window? (Though to be kind we should maybe mark offsite links somehow besides instructions in the title box.)

You want control, you got it. Now you just have to figure out how to make it work correctly in Mozilla ;)

UPDATE: And on Macs, period. Thanks to Steven Jarvis for the heads up. I'm thinking of aiming for the "z" key instead of event keys. Will this work? I don't know, stay tuned. 10/13

October 11, 2003