I agree that correctly written SPAs shouldn't break middle/ctrl click, but browsers make it harder than it should be. A few years ago I was implementing a SPA.

I agree that correctly written SPAs shouldn't break middle/ctrl click, but browsers make it harder than it should be. A few years ago I was implementing a SPA. I carefully made every clickable element that takes you to a new permalinkable "page" an <a> tag with the correct href for that permalink, and then set up some click handlers to intercept the user clicking the link and do an AJAX call instead of a full page load. Unfortunately some browsers would still send a click event for a middle or ctrl-click, which meant that if I wanted to avoid breaking that I had to write extra code to check if it was a middle click or ctrl-click and not call preventDefault if so. My recollection is that Chrome got it right but Safari and/or Firefox had the behavior I'm describing. Browsers should make it easy for apps to do the right thing, not make it harder.