Better Safari experience.

Why is it that when I try to open a new browser tab with “Command + Click” in Safari, I sometimes get the expected new tab; while the current browser also navigates to the new url? This always happens in discussion topics when I try to open a topic in a new tab containing the thread. I get the new new tab while my existing browser window also shows the new thread leaving me to navigate back to my starting point. Very irritating.

If I “Cmd+click” the “Show new replies to my posts” link above; things work as expected though. I get a new tab containing the new replies to my posts.

Why the inconsistency?

HTML does not control this behaviour and there does not seem to be any Javascript event connected to these links. The inconsistency is therefore totally down to the browser.

This sounds like an issue related to the well know control click issues that people have voiced over time. I’ve previously looked into it and found the specific code causing the problem. I wrote up a nice little report on it and sent it up the chain of command to Andre. The bugfix has a tentative schedule of eventually.

A redundancy within HTML and Javascript are the reason this issue exists. Discussion topics and some other links are handled by both an HTML tag and a Javascript onclick event that was put in place as a hasty attempt to improve mobile browsing experience. No, fixing the bug while including the larger link space wouldn’t be hard at all, but it has been set aside as being a “we’ll get around to this eventually” kind of thing. For what it is worth, that’s not my call. I tracked it down and formulated a solution late one night back in June.

Cool, I didn’t spot a JavaScript event but I wasn’t digging too deeply. I have to admit, I wasn’t expecting to find an event bound, so when I saw a vanilla anchor tag with the href filled out, I just assumed “hm, no JavaScript here”.