HN Explorer

Ask HN: Can I have this HN feature for Christmas?

3 points by imjoel ↗ HN
I love Hacker News. It quickly became my #1 favorite site in 2010. But, I really hate that stories don't open in a new tab. I click on a link to read a story, then close the tab when I'm done--forgetting Hacker News is click back. This leaves me having to open a new tab to come back to HN. This happens a few times a day. It's just not good.

Hacker News, can you make offsite links open in a new tabs? Please?

16 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 48.6 ms ] thread
sga
Ctrl-click or Command-click is the answer.
mybbor
Or, scroll wheel click.
da5e
Yes, and the wheel on the mouse. Lately I've been using Hacker News Onepage and enjoying it: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/plldnnbdlbgbiknj...
imjoel
Perhaps I'm an edge case. My MBP doesn't have a center click. :P
brk
No, but it has a right-click. Use it.
[dead] imjoel
Weak. Why should I have to? I believe opening a new window for offsite pages is standard practice for news aggregators.
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
fooandbarify
Let cmd-click be your friend :)

EDIT: Sorry, didn't notice your response below.

spydertennis
Yeah but you can get BetterTouchTool and use 3 finger click to open in new tab. It's awesome.
imjoel
It is _an_ answer. It interrupts my experience when I forget to Command-click and close the tab on accident.
brk
In this case, I think it's _the_ answer. Your request goes against the grain of what most people would tend to prefer: links act as they were designed to, user modifies behavior by choice.
cd34
shift-command-t to restore last closed window(s)
cd34
here I thought you were going to ask for higher contrast text in the Ask HN: posts. :)
makecheck
I generally hate having sites "decide" this for me. This is almost certainly a personal preference.

When I use Atomic on the iPad I set it to open off-site links in new tabs. Yet on my desktop, I never do. This is a setting in various browsers.

proexploit
I agree with others that this doesn't make sense to become a default. However, it doesn't mean that's your only option. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/57563 looks like it might do the trick (although I haven't tried it). If not, it shouldn't be too difficult to create your own GreaseMonkey script and solve your problem.
pkamb
When you click a link, it opens in the current tab.

When you middle-click a link, it opens in a new tab (in the background).

I HATE sites that go against this, and decide for me where to open the link. Especially since Chrome has an outstanding bug where middle-clicking links with target attributes opens then in a new foreground tab. So annoying.