Serious Eats - seriouseats.com

Hi, Chiff0nade. Yes. It's by design.

I think there are two schools of thought out there: one is that you can design your site so that links open in new windows. The theory is that the reader then never navigates away from your site. Pros: Readers always have the site's window open and can come back to it. Cons: This forces the reader's browser to open window upon window and decides for the user how s/he is going to browse. (You'll see the pro here is a pro only for the site, not the reader.)

The other is the one we subscribe to -- which sends users away on click. Our hope is that our content is compelling enough that you end up coming back anyway. Pros: The reader can leave the site but still use the Back button to navigate back to the site. It doesn't open up tons of windows and clutter up your desktop. It gives YOU control over whether you want to open the link in a new window—you can always force the browser to open the link in a new window or tab by holding down the Command key (Mac) or the Control key (PC) or by right clicking and choosing "Open link in new window." Cons: Forces readers away from publisher's site.

Thanks for asking and giving me a chance to clarify that.

Building on what shea wrote, the W3C's Content Accessibility Checklist for WCAG 1.0 recommends, "10.1 Until user agents allow users to turn off spawned windows, do not cause pop-ups or other windows to appear and do not change the current window without informing the user." This is apparently being modified for the WCAG 2.0 standard currently being worked on.

@Jason ROFLMAO. After the rest of the highly technical (and most appreciated) responses, you're speaking my language!

I ask this because I recently started using "tabbed browsing" through IE. I'm finding that I like it a lot because when those additional browsers come blasting open after clicking new links, I can close those new browsers and just be left with my core tabs open. They usually consist of: Whatever streaming music I'm listening to at the time; my personal e-mail; and whatever food site I'm reading. Maybe Photobucket.

When I come to SE, I'll just have to remember to click BACK but it's no sweat because I can easily open a new tab and get SE right back.

Thanks to all who responded :D !

kjgibson: There's an even easier way of doing what you're doing and that is to hold down the Command key (formerly the Apple key) while clicking the link. (It cuts out the middleman, i.e., the pop-up Control/Right-Click menu.)

@kjgibson - In Explorer, you set options to utilize tabbed browsing. After that, you choose how you would like the newly opened tabbed browser windows to appear, i.e. with your home page (my option) or blank, always go to the new tab (instead of remaining on the existing tab), etc. I like this a lot better than opening multiple browsers because you can always see the tabs at the top of the page.