heisel.org

It’s my browser, not yours

Friday | February 13, 2004 | 2:30 pm  

And I’ll decide when to open links a new window, thank you very much.

E-media Tidbit’s Steve Outing gets it wrong when he sug­gests that papers should send read­ers to off-​site links in a new window.

His sug­ges­tion that the new window be sized small enough to indi­cate that the orig­i­nal site is under­neath is a valiant effort to combat the usabil­ity prob­lem of break­ing the back button, but it intro­duces another.

To open a window with a spec­i­fied size, you’d have to use Javascript, which would mean the href would prob­a­bly point to “#”, while an onClick event would be set.

For users who have grown tired of win­dows open­ing out of nowhere and who prob­a­bly now open links in new win­dows (via context-​menus) or in new tabs, they’ll get a blank window and be forced to go back and use the Javascript link provided.

Remem­ber, it’s my browser, not yours.

By not link­ing off-​site, or by doing so with annoy­ing new win­dows, sites are merely gen­er­at­ing ill will among their users.

Con­sider how little effort it takes to copy an off-​site link and paste it into the URL field if I want to leave your site (or the even smaller amount of effort it takes to close the browser).

To those dig­i­tal naysay­ers who are now plot­ting to remove any off-​site URLs from their con­tent, (linked or unlinked), con­sider how little effort it’ll take me to leave your page, go to Google and search for the com­pany or site you men­tioned but didn’t pro­vide a URL for.

So ask your­self, if it’s so easy to leave your site when you’re making it dif­fi­cult then why try and stop them from leav­ing? Instead, pro­vide plain ol’ simple “a href’s” and gen­er­ate some good­will among your users.

Happy users means more users, which means happy advertisers.

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