New window or not?
Friday, 17 January 2003 18:26![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pneWe were talking at work recently about the behaviour of external web links. A co-worker said that he expects that all site-internal web links open in the same window but that all site-external web links open in another window. I expect all links to open in the same window by default, since that gives users a choice: most browsers allow a user to select "open in this window" or "open in a new window". Forcing the link to open in a new window removes one of those choices since both options become equivalent.
My co-worker argued two things: (a) every click is a click too many: people are lazy so make the default action require as little as possible, and (b) the default action should be to open external links in a new window so that they can easily return to the site they just left -- since you want to try to keep them on your site as long as possible.
I'm not sure; after all, in theory "the customer is king" and you're supposed to serve him so the way to keep them on your site is to make the content easily accessible and interesting, not by browser gadgets such as popping up new windows.
What do you think? Should "exit links" open a new window or not? What do Internet users expect from clicking on a link?
My co-worker argued two things: (a) every click is a click too many: people are lazy so make the default action require as little as possible, and (b) the default action should be to open external links in a new window so that they can easily return to the site they just left -- since you want to try to keep them on your site as long as possible.
I'm not sure; after all, in theory "the customer is king" and you're supposed to serve him so the way to keep them on your site is to make the content easily accessible and interesting, not by browser gadgets such as popping up new windows.
What do you think? Should "exit links" open a new window or not? What do Internet users expect from clicking on a link?
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no subject
Date: Friday, 17 January 2003 15:57 (UTC)Fortunately, the "pop up a new window" issue can be solved easily, because I can configure Opera to not open a new window even if it says target="_blank" in the link tag.
In many aspects, Opera is (in my opinion) the way a browser should be where other browsers fail miserably. A major one of these is the "back" function. Netscape and (as I've read above in this thread) Mozilla reload pages when you go back -- BAH! Why would they need to? Internet Explorer at least uses the cache to reconstruct the page, but still that's insufficient to me. Using the "back" function in Opera is (in terms of speed and behaviour) equivalent to switching to a different window. As a result, I never really need to keep pages open in other windows, as long as I can remember what window I have to go "back" in to reach the page I was on. Also, in Opera you never lose information you entered into a form (such as a LiveJournal entry you wrote) when you use the "back" function.
no subject
Date: Friday, 17 January 2003 22:43 (UTC)How is that done? Is that possible in Opera 6 or only in 7? I haven't seen such an option, but I haven't looked that hard.
One thing I dislike about Opera, though, is that if an element (especially an image or a link) has a "title" attribute, it'll display that in the status line. I'm annoyed enough with JavaScript playing with the status line on link mouseovers since I'd like to see where the link goes without having to go through contortions such as "right-click, select 'copy link address', paste into textarea somewhere".
IIRC, Mozilla does what I like -- displays the title attribute in a tooltip and the link destination in the status bar. Opera can display the title in a tooltip but only in addition to displaying it in the status bar. I wish that were changed.
Other than that, I quite like Opera, too. (Especially since they added Unicode support. Before that, it was not worth considering as far as I was concerned.)
Re:
Date: Saturday, 18 January 2003 05:32 (UTC)It's the option "Refuse pop-up windows" under "Windows". Granted, not very intuitive naming. It also turns off all JavaScript pop-up windows - even those that may be wanted :/
By the way, I'm still using 6.05. I've looked into the 7 preview and I didn't like it very much. I'll look into 7 again when it's out, and then I'll start bombarding them with bug reports (*evil grin*).
One thing I dislike about Opera
One thing I like about Opera is that no matter what you dislike about it, you can bring it up here (https://bugs.opera.com/bugreport.cgi). :) And I did that a lot when 6 came out, and many of them were fixed up until 6.05.
Other than that, I quite like Opera, too. (Especially since they added Unicode support. [...])
I totally agree. I tried Opera 5 way back then, and Unicode is what I missed from it first. I was excited when 6 came out.
Opera bug report form
Date: Saturday, 18 January 2003 06:10 (UTC)