I have a few shortcuts on my Windows XP desktop that are URLs. Double clicking opens an IE browser window with that URL. But if I already have IE open, instead of opening a new window it uses the open one, which is usually not desirable, especially if it has the start of a posting to SDMB!
If there are more than one open IE windows, I can’t figure out how to predict which one will get reused.
Is there any way to force a new window to open in this situation?
Slightly tangental–but possibly a solution. The firefox browser also does this, but it always reuses the more recently opened tab of the most recently opened window. And since you will know this, you will generally open an empty tab before clicking on the shortcut.
I suspect though that the real solution is to drag and drop the link into the browser window you want instead of clicking it. I can’t verify this at the moment–but I am 90% certain you can do this.
I find that if all windows are minimized, then IE will open a new window. If multiple windows are present (and not minimized), I think it chooses the one that’s currently active.
Ther’s a setting to control that behavior in IE. By default, it uses any open visible window to display a shortcut. You can turn that off so any shortcut gets opened in a fresh window.
Start IE, then from the menu select Tools | Internet Options …
In the dialog box, click the “Advanced” tab.
About the 17th item under the “Browsing” header says “Reuse windows for launching shortcuts.” Uncheck that box and click [OK].
You may need to close all browser windows once before you see the change in behavior.
Firefox has a similar setting.
Go under tools -> options -> advanced -> tabbed settings and under “open links from other applications” check “a new window”