8 ms·

My rule of thumb: if you could ever imagine a user wanting to control-click open in new tab or right-click open in new window, it should be a link. It's infuria

My rule of thumb: if you could ever imagine a user wanting to control-click open in new tab or right-click open in new window, it should be a link. It's infuriating how many modern sites don't let you do this when the thing you're clicking on clearly ends up displaying a different view that you can independently navigate to in another tab or window.

nostromo 4y ago
Sometimes command+click will still work to open into a new tab when a right-click does not.
- sio8ohPi 4y ago
  Sometimes Command+Click will open in a new tab when Middle Click doesn't work, and sometimes Middle Click will open in a new tab when Command+Click won't work. If you're using Gmail, you get both types of behavior on the same page!
  - Tagbert 4y ago
    Isn’t middle click a user defined function? Is it system defined? I assume you could assign ctrl/cmd-click to the middle button if you want. I’ve not worked on a system with a middle mouse button in many years.
    - aidenn0 4y ago
      I haven't owned a mouse without the ability to middle click ever (my first mouse had a ball and 3 buttons; I think a Logitech c7?). If your mouse has a scroll-wheel, then it's probably clickable as a middle-click. If you have a trackpad without a 3rd button then there is usually a gesture that will send a middle click.
- aendruk 4y ago
  And some of those times, the parent still navigates so you get duplicate tabs. Ugh!
muniom 4y ago
Even more infuriating when you attempt to implement correct usage of links/buttons & get pushback such as "what's control-click? no one does that. non-issue."
- munk-a 4y ago
  It's a hard fight to fight, certainly, but a common tactic I've employed to counter this is "Web standards exist for a reason and we don't want our website called out for being inaccessible to the blind community. Additionally - these standards have been revised and refined over decades and I don't feel comfortable subverting some of these rules without considering them all - it may break our compatibility with some browsers."
  - wildrhythms 4y ago
    I can tell you from firsthand experience that the people demanding the wrong implementation do not understand the purpose of web standards, much less care about the rationale for following them. On the front end I have seen unimaginably poor designs be implemented with as little justification as "Our pilot users said the UI 'looks cleaner' to do it this way [the wrong way]" and the management is satisfied with that.
    - munk-a 4y ago
      Hence why I harp in on two specific points "You don't want to piss off blind people" and "You don't want cross browser compatibility to suffer" - most technical background managers will hear the second point and have a flashback to IE6 or IE4 and immediately start backpedaling, while non-technical background managers will hear the first point and wonder if AADP will end up suing them. The statement I made is not a genuine expression of the most important reasons - it is a tool to persuade management using cherry picked boogiemen to scare foklks into the right decision... aka a bad faith argument made for the best of reasons.
munk-a 4y ago
I would like to second part of this more concisely for emphasis because I think designers too often get caught up and let usability suffer for the sake of "usability". Please, for the love of god, let open up anything on your site in a new tab.
- OJFord 4y ago
  It's not really just about (UI/UX) design, to be fair, being able to open in a new tab requires that it's a directly navigable 'page' by URL to begin with. With SPAs, that's often not true for entire 'pages', never mind modals and views you might not be expected to want in a new tab but do.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    That's a quite fair point, but as a counter point in most business cases you do want specific views (even specific searches and user applied filters) to be addressable - it's one reason why I think the history/location API is such a necessity for SPAs. And if you do have an address like example.com/#widget/view?hideWhitespace=false then you can bind your link href to that address and then, if the link is engaged without modification, do your fancy SPA stuff. I also think in the modern world that as long as your assets are all properly versioned with good cache control headers using actually web requests for navigation instead of a self-contained SPA makes a lot less sense. Once upon a time an SPA was a solution to shifty internet, limited bandwidth and rich web experiences - those arguments have become a lot less valid in the modern world. (this is a topic extremely near and dear to my heart as a (eh-sorta) full stack developer that needs to suffer through many poorly built applications as a user)
  - zwkrt 4y ago
    couterpoint: users don't care if your page is SPA. They care about opening new tabs.
    - irrational 4y ago
      Exactly. It don’t care if it takes more work for you as a developer to make everything a pageable URL. Just make it work the way I expect it to work.
jimjimjim 4y ago
yes! Far too many sites have terrible experiences when you 'try to got back to something'. back button shenanigans, full page reloads, unable to retrieve data, and worst: losing something that you were half way through writing or doing. I just want everything to always open in a new tab (or sometimes a new window). gmail yep, music sites yep, youtube yep.
- stjohnswarts 4y ago
  I know it's not what you want necessarily but if you didn't know right clicking on the back button will give you a lot more options and let you go back to various points in history. I find it necessary quite often because I believe that ublock fucks with javascript and breaks a lot of "back button" stuff. I still am never gonna give it up though.
bern4444 4y ago
Grubhub is one such site when trying to cmd+click on a restaurant. It's absurd their engineers haven't fixed something so simple.
- eru 4y ago
  Perhaps they don't want you to be able to do that?
notyourwork 4y ago
Single page apps have bastardized the web and reduced consistent usability in so many ways such as your example.
- moring 4y ago
  Prior to SPAs we had multi-page applications telling the user "don't use the back button or tabs, they break the website". Was that really better?
  - yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
    False dichotomy. A poor implementation of a generally sensible approach is not justification to embrace a more complex and error-prone approach.
    - moring 4y ago
      This argument can be used word-by-word in favor of SPAs and against earlier web applications, but it's a No True Scotsman either way.
      - yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
        But then you’re making the argument that a SPA is less complex than a more orthodox equivalent, and I don’t think that’s the case.
        moring 4y ago
        It was definitely the case for most applications I have worked with because they had to perform client-side logic on the server side. Most SPAs I've seen at least have clearly separated responsibilities between the two, AND they don't act as if there wasn't a network in between.
        yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
spockz 4y ago
It gets even worse with azure devops. It tracks which repository/branch/feed/board you looked at last and then shows that one when you go the respective features. Which means that when you copy the url it does not always include your exact location and you need to do dance to switch the repository or branch to another and back in order to get it in the url. To make it worse ctrl/cmd click for opening it in a new tab doesn’t always work. Sometimes it open the repo you clicked on in a new tab, sometimes it opens a new tab but with your most recent repo, and sometimes it just opens the repo in the current tab. It is infuriating…
- tartoran 4y ago
  The modern web us utterly broken in this sense and the culprit is SPAs. At this point it seems like the road has no return as the new generations of devs will have no idea how the web of even 10 years ago was behaving. Maybe it’ll all come down under it’s own weight one day.
  - undefinedzero 4y ago
    The culprit is bad frontend developers and sometimes design. Nothing wrong with SPAs, and it's not that hard to make them usable. Azure DevOps is still utterly shit though.
    - raydiatian 4y ago
      Are there actual use cases where Azure cloud is the right choice?
      - spockz 4y ago
        Azure the cloud and azure dev ops are two separate but integrated things from the same company. DevOps itself runs in azure. I think there are plenty of reasons to choose Azure Cloud. Maybe Azure Devops flows from that. But it is far from my favourite tool.
koplt 4y ago
I usually click mousewheel to open new tab
datagram 4y ago
I have a thread on Twitter where I've been keeping track of times that I've run into this. https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1268661032890896387 https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1268661032890896387 One of the most annoying examples I encounter on a regular basis is in Twitter's trends sidebar, where they don't use links, but instead have manually added event listeners for ctrl-click and middle-click.

nostromo 4y ago

Sometimes command+click will still work to open into a new tab when a right-click does not.

sio8ohPi 4y ago
Sometimes Command+Click will open in a new tab when Middle Click doesn't work, and sometimes Middle Click will open in a new tab when Command+Click won't work. If you're using Gmail, you get both types of behavior on the same page!
- Tagbert 4y ago
  Isn’t middle click a user defined function? Is it system defined? I assume you could assign ctrl/cmd-click to the middle button if you want. I’ve not worked on a system with a middle mouse button in many years.
  - aidenn0 4y ago
    I haven't owned a mouse without the ability to middle click ever (my first mouse had a ball and 3 buttons; I think a Logitech c7?). If your mouse has a scroll-wheel, then it's probably clickable as a middle-click. If you have a trackpad without a 3rd button then there is usually a gesture that will send a middle click.
aendruk 4y ago
And some of those times, the parent still navigates so you get duplicate tabs. Ugh!

muniom 4y ago

Even more infuriating when you attempt to implement correct usage of links/buttons & get pushback such as "what's control-click? no one does that. non-issue."

munk-a 4y ago
It's a hard fight to fight, certainly, but a common tactic I've employed to counter this is "Web standards exist for a reason and we don't want our website called out for being inaccessible to the blind community. Additionally - these standards have been revised and refined over decades and I don't feel comfortable subverting some of these rules without considering them all - it may break our compatibility with some browsers."
- wildrhythms 4y ago
  I can tell you from firsthand experience that the people demanding the wrong implementation do not understand the purpose of web standards, much less care about the rationale for following them. On the front end I have seen unimaginably poor designs be implemented with as little justification as "Our pilot users said the UI 'looks cleaner' to do it this way [the wrong way]" and the management is satisfied with that.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    Hence why I harp in on two specific points "You don't want to piss off blind people" and "You don't want cross browser compatibility to suffer" - most technical background managers will hear the second point and have a flashback to IE6 or IE4 and immediately start backpedaling, while non-technical background managers will hear the first point and wonder if AADP will end up suing them. The statement I made is not a genuine expression of the most important reasons - it is a tool to persuade management using cherry picked boogiemen to scare foklks into the right decision... aka a bad faith argument made for the best of reasons.

munk-a 4y ago

I would like to second part of this more concisely for emphasis because I think designers too often get caught up and let usability suffer for the sake of "usability". Please, for the love of god, let open up anything on your site in a new tab.

OJFord 4y ago
It's not really just about (UI/UX) design, to be fair, being able to open in a new tab requires that it's a directly navigable 'page' by URL to begin with. With SPAs, that's often not true for entire 'pages', never mind modals and views you might not be expected to want in a new tab but do.
- munk-a 4y ago
  That's a quite fair point, but as a counter point in most business cases you do want specific views (even specific searches and user applied filters) to be addressable - it's one reason why I think the history/location API is such a necessity for SPAs. And if you do have an address like example.com/#widget/view?hideWhitespace=false then you can bind your link href to that address and then, if the link is engaged without modification, do your fancy SPA stuff. I also think in the modern world that as long as your assets are all properly versioned with good cache control headers using actually web requests for navigation instead of a self-contained SPA makes a lot less sense. Once upon a time an SPA was a solution to shifty internet, limited bandwidth and rich web experiences - those arguments have become a lot less valid in the modern world. (this is a topic extremely near and dear to my heart as a (eh-sorta) full stack developer that needs to suffer through many poorly built applications as a user)
- zwkrt 4y ago
  couterpoint: users don't care if your page is SPA. They care about opening new tabs.
  - irrational 4y ago
    Exactly. It don’t care if it takes more work for you as a developer to make everything a pageable URL. Just make it work the way I expect it to work.

jimjimjim 4y ago

yes! Far too many sites have terrible experiences when you 'try to got back to something'. back button shenanigans, full page reloads, unable to retrieve data, and worst: losing something that you were half way through writing or doing. I just want everything to always open in a new tab (or sometimes a new window). gmail yep, music sites yep, youtube yep.

stjohnswarts 4y ago
I know it's not what you want necessarily but if you didn't know right clicking on the back button will give you a lot more options and let you go back to various points in history. I find it necessary quite often because I believe that ublock fucks with javascript and breaks a lot of "back button" stuff. I still am never gonna give it up though.

bern4444 4y ago

Grubhub is one such site when trying to cmd+click on a restaurant. It's absurd their engineers haven't fixed something so simple.

eru 4y ago
Perhaps they don't want you to be able to do that?

notyourwork 4y ago

Single page apps have bastardized the web and reduced consistent usability in so many ways such as your example.

moring 4y ago
Prior to SPAs we had multi-page applications telling the user "don't use the back button or tabs, they break the website". Was that really better?
- yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
  False dichotomy. A poor implementation of a generally sensible approach is not justification to embrace a more complex and error-prone approach.
  - moring 4y ago
    This argument can be used word-by-word in favor of SPAs and against earlier web applications, but it's a No True Scotsman either way.
    - yakshaving_jgt 4y ago
      But then you’re making the argument that a SPA is less complex than a more orthodox equivalent, and I don’t think that’s the case.
      - moring 4y ago
        It was definitely the case for most applications I have worked with because they had to perform client-side logic on the server side. Most SPAs I've seen at least have clearly separated responsibilities between the two, AND they don't act as if there wasn't a network in between.
        yakshaving_jgt 4y ago

spockz 4y ago

It gets even worse with azure devops. It tracks which repository/branch/feed/board you looked at last and then shows that one when you go the respective features. Which means that when you copy the url it does not always include your exact location and you need to do dance to switch the repository or branch to another and back in order to get it in the url. To make it worse ctrl/cmd click for opening it in a new tab doesn’t always work. Sometimes it open the repo you clicked on in a new tab, sometimes it opens a new tab but with your most recent repo, and sometimes it just opens the repo in the current tab. It is infuriating…

tartoran 4y ago
The modern web us utterly broken in this sense and the culprit is SPAs. At this point it seems like the road has no return as the new generations of devs will have no idea how the web of even 10 years ago was behaving. Maybe it’ll all come down under it’s own weight one day.
- undefinedzero 4y ago
  The culprit is bad frontend developers and sometimes design. Nothing wrong with SPAs, and it's not that hard to make them usable. Azure DevOps is still utterly shit though.
  - raydiatian 4y ago
    Are there actual use cases where Azure cloud is the right choice?
    - spockz 4y ago
      Azure the cloud and azure dev ops are two separate but integrated things from the same company. DevOps itself runs in azure. I think there are plenty of reasons to choose Azure Cloud. Maybe Azure Devops flows from that. But it is far from my favourite tool.

koplt 4y ago

I usually click mousewheel to open new tab

datagram 4y ago

I have a thread on Twitter where I've been keeping track of times that I've run into this. https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1268661032890896387 https://twitter.com/gramofdata/status/1268661032890896387 One of the most annoying examples I encounter on a regular basis is in Twitter's trends sidebar, where they don't use links, but instead have manually added event listeners for ctrl-click and middle-click.