If I try to open a thread on the Dope or just about anywhere else on the net by holding down the shift key while clicking, the thread will open in a new window.
But if I go to Slate.com and use the same technique it opens the new window but doesn’t take me there. It bounces me back to the original Slate site.
Usually if you click on a link inside a page on the Dope it will automatically take you to a new window. But I clicked on a link to a Slate page inside a thread and… it opened the window but bounced me back to the Dope thread.
What’s going on?
I was only able to reproduce it on Slate (with IE6.0) when clicking the link also triggered a pop-under ad (for Netflix). When there was no pop-under ad it worked fine, when there was a pop-under it returned me to the original Slate window. I would imagine it is related to the javascript driving the pop-under window. Since it doesn’t know you clicked the link in a way that triggered a new window it is set to return focus to the original Slate window (otherwise it wouldn’t be a pop *under.
Couldn’t reproduce it at all in Firefox 2.0.0.4
I’m sorry. I intended to include that I’m using IE7 and plumb forgot.
The pop-under notion is interesting. I use Ad Aware, which normally eliminates pop-unders so I don’t see them. But Slate can’t be the only site that uses pop-unders and it seems to be the only one I have this oddity with.
I’ll have to do more experimenting.
Without doing any research at all, I’m going to guess that there’s some javascript going on to prevent you “deep linking”. Basically it checks the calling page in the browser’s history and if it’s not slate.com, it bounces you to the top. opening a link in a new window, the new window will have no previous page and so it get’s bounced.
The new window still loads the content (in my recreation anyway), it just immediately loses focus back to the parent window.
Yes, exactlly. You can obviously deep link to a specific Slate page because that’s what the Dope link that I described did.