Should links open in new windows?
In my job, I get asked every now and then: “Can we make links to other websites open in new windows?” The reason generally given is to avoid “losing” site visitors.
The answer, in short, should be “No”. There are a couple of points to raise here:
The target attribute is deprecated, and not valid in modern web standards (i.e. no ‘target=”_blank”‘). However, the functionality could still be done using javascript and validating against web standards. So… why shouldn’t we just use javascript to do this?
The core reason comes down to one of accessibility. Opening links in new windows breaks the browser back button (a new window has no ‘back’ history) and can be confusing to some users - for example, the new window can cover the original one, and with no ‘back’ to get back to the previous page, a user can potentially get disorientated. Instead, let your users choose to open links in a new tab or window if they wish.
Users will come back to a site once they’ve followed an external links, if there’s more content there of interest to them. Keeping them happy by making their experience of the site as pleasurable and simple as possible will help encourage their return 
No, they should open in a new tab…
Comment by oli — May 23, 2009 @ 9:05 pm
Opening a link in a new tab still ‘breaks’ the back button, and gives the user no choice in the matter. I’d agree that often it’s good to open links in new tabs, and indeed have many tabs open as I write this. However, users should be allowed to be in control of their experience, and can very easily open links in new windows or tabs if they wish. What isn’t easy is to override the “open in new window” behaviour and open that sort of link within the current window.
As an example, consider the behaviour of an extremely high-traffic website: Google. Each search result is from another domain (OK, virtually all of them!), but those links open within the same window. Google has left the user in control. So while I will sometimes choose to open a set of results in tabs to review each one, at other times I’ll just click the one which is obviously what I’m looking for, and the default behaviour means that the new page replaces the now irrelevant set of results.
It’s informative to explore the reasons behind a request like this - typically, the reason given is “we want the visitors to stay on our site” (i.e. the reasoning is not actually giving consideration to the users’ wants or needs). As I mentioned, a user who wants to keep reading a given site “Site A” can easily return to it, since it’s in their history. However, if they have no more interest in Site A once they’ve followed a link out of it, it doesn’t matter whether Site A is still open in the original browser window [or tab] - the user will just close that window.
My original post was just a quick one, but there’s a wealth of additional information out there. For example, Jakob Nielsen’s Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design has this topic featuring at number 9.
Jakob Nielsen makes another point worth bringing into the mix here: “users spend most of their time on other websites”. This means that we should work with the expectations which users will have built up on those sites. If we consider this alongside the Google example above, it therefore makes sense - regardless of other considerations - to meet users’ expectations and take the same approach with links.
Comment by bryan — June 3, 2009 @ 10:26 pm