There’s obviously a lot of opinion here, but there are practical aspects, too. If you set your site up to open links in the current window, it’s easy for me to override that and make it open in a new window. As far as I know, if you force a new window, I can’t override that and make the link open in the current window.
Although coding your site to open a new window automatically is rude and obnoxious, it’s fairly common practice from Web designers that are trying to hold you on their site. There are sites that I simply don’t use anymore because I get so sick of the window proliferation problem.
Yes, Jakob Nielsen, king of mid-1990s web design concepts.
I do agree with the new windows thing, but most things on his site I will take with a grain of salt. If you know what you’re doing, you can break most of his rules.
This is why only losers use browsers without tabs. If you want to open a link without “losing” where you’re at in the browser history, than open the link in a new tab. It’s the users’ choice; not the webmaster’s. Ok, even losers can use the “open in new window” option, but that’s a friggin mess, too, because you have new windows all over the place – or Windows users have a massive, full screen window because that’s almost all they know.
Think of it this way: the option to open in new tab/window is universal in all browsers. The option to force a link not to open in a new window is nowhere to be found. Given the options, the polite thing to do is let the user decide.
And I’m just picking on the non-tab users; I don’t mean anything by it.
Balthisar your point about being ble to right click and open in a new window or tab is a good one.
As an aside I really don’t like the tabs in any browser I have used, firefox or opera. Is there a way to have both tabs up at the same time? I run a big high resolution screen and can have two windows open side by side. But if I am using tabs I cannot look at two pages side by side.
From a web developer perspective, the TARGET attribute is so 1990s. Opening additional browser windows (for IE users), or new tabs (practically everyone else), should remain a user preference and not coded into a web page.