Why doesn't Hacker News open links in a new tab?

I like that it doesn't automatically open in a new tab. That means I have control over whether I want it to open in a new tab. It puts users in control, and that's good.

But it does open links in a new tab, most of the time - because I choose to use my browser's "open in new tab" feature when I click on its links. I appreciate the fact that Hacker News lets me do what I want, instead of trying to override my preferences with some excessively clever bit of scripting.

My take: Other news aggregators want more pageviews, higher time-spend-on-site metrics, more advertising revenue, year-on-year growth. To my knowledge HN doesn't have any of those aspirations.

target="_blank" is an anti-user design choice.

If a link does not set target="_blank", you can always choose how it will be opened: in this tab, or in a new one, with a left or middle click.

If it has target="_blank", it'll always open in a new tab, even if you don't want it to, and there's no visual indicator that this parameter has been set.

I never set target="_blank" as a general rule for this reason.

Middle-Click...Middle-Click...Middle-Click...Middle-Click...Middle-Click

That's the wheel, for you guys coming from a two-button-mouse Operating System.

We had a spirited debate about this in our application at work recently. Some devs feel (strongly) that having no option to open links on the same page is a user-hostile choice. Other devs feels (also strongly) that users most likely want to open a link in a new tab so that’s what should happen.

We never reached an agreement but someone did make a claim, that I was unable to verify, that modern users don’t use the back button and therefore relying on it to allow users to find their way back is unacceptable. I wonder if anyone else has heard that (I suspect the HN crowd knows about the back button though ;))

Use Ctrl+click or Right-click > Open in new tab? It's not complicated.

I like it because it reinforces the need to Ctrl-click links. I never click links, I always ctrl-click it after hovering over a link to check the url first.

Also, CTRL and left arrow will return you back to the HN. It's not that big of a deal? Also, it's a good thing as it teaches you some good habits. Why depend on a site to open links in new tabs? Do it yourself. That way you force consistent behavior across all websites/links.

I like that it doesn't open new tabs. I will usually look at the main page and open a few links or conversations in new tabs, but for most links I just dip in and out of the comments with my forward and back keys since I'm mostly trying to just figure out if the entry is worth my time. If it looks like I'm going to engage with it more I'll give it it's own tab.

Why do you want to remove my choice in the matter?

I use middle mouse click, thumb mouse click, control click, and right mouse click + left click on "open in new tab".

Each method is dependent upon various things including, how I'm sitting, number of items I plan to open, number of comment sections vs just article link, and most importantly, how sore my hands are. Some methods are faster but strain my wrist more than I care to do, so I do those sparingly.

One of the reasons I love this site is the UI, it's very simple and gets out of the way for you. If you want to change the opening mechanism to only do new tabs, you are completely able to do so with code.

To answer your question, there are a variety of reasons why HN may choose to do it this way, other sites have different reasons so you see different site behavior.

In Firefox you can use middle mouse click or Ctrl+click to open a link in new tab

I'd like to see this as a setting, so both camps can be appeased. I'm like OP, I keep forgetting to manually open in a new tab, then wonder where HN has gone after I close the tab again.

We're all curmudgeons and a lot of us like it like this.

I like to choose. Since I browse on my phone mostly I use the preview to see if I even want to Open the link, then go to new tab. So then I guess it does

I do not know why, but I prefer it to be like this.

However, if it helps:

- Control + Click OR Mouse middle-click