… you have been warned…
Do you set your links to open in a new window?
Psst…
A few people who searched for Universiti Malaysia Terengganu (UMT) were brought to my blog. My guess is that they are offered a place to do their undergrad studies in UMT. Congratulations! :) If you are one of them and have questions you’d like to ask, please feel free to do so. Otherwise, have a look at some pictures of UMT campus in my Flickr account.
Now, I have this very queer habit of setting my links to open in a new window. Each time, without fail, I’ll insert target="_blank" into all my out-going links before I published my post. And my only justification is that I do not wish to encourage my readers to navigate away from my blog whenever they clicked on the links in my post (as you can see, I’m very generous when it comes to linking other sites and blogs).
When I blog-hop, I open all links in a new tab so that I can continue reading whatever I am reading. And whenever I’m done with one blog, I’ll close the page and hop to the next one. Actually, this explains why blog-hopping is such a time-consuming, err, activity. In fact, I sometimes find it very annoying that out-going links open in the current window, when I’m not even done reading the post!
So, my question is, do you like it that way? Do all those new windows/tabs annoy you? Would you prefer to open a link in the current window, or would you prefer it to open in a new window? Why?
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I prefer to have external links open in a new browser window, but I do make an effort to include a note in the TITLE attribute of the link code to indicate that the link will open in a new browser window. Hopefully, this little extra bit of info that you’ve presented before clicking a link will prevent some frustration for those who don’t like links that spawn new windows…
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Well, i always vote for multiple tabs / windows when it comes to opening up external links. And that’s basically why I love Firefox so much – clean source code + speedy loading but i hate to put up the code for the function at my page. Well, guess there are people like me who will always right click at the link and select “open link in new tab”… =)
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I’ve read that some bloggers & web dev folks think that having your links open other windows is kinda like forcing your preferences upon others. But with lesser-experienced visitors, it’s entirely likely that they don’t know how to open links in another tab – and it’s not even necessarily a safe assumption that they have a tabbed-enabled browser.
So I’ve tried to balance those two concerns by making the reader aware that by clicking a link, it will spawn a new window.
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I prefer to open a link in a new window. Sometimes links appear in the middle of a blog entry and I would prefer to finish off with whatever I’m reading before I go on to the next.
It’s also because I’m greedy. I like my Internet Explorer/Mozilla Firefox browser to be filled with lots of tabs!