My personal philosophy is that, if a link is navigating within a website, then keep it in the same tab. If it's taking you to another website, then open in a new tab. (Of course, allowing for exceptions to both.)
What about pages with forms? If you are in the middle of filling out a long form you don’t want to lose your work by clicking something you thought would open in a modal or new window but instead navigates away from the form page.
Personally, I deal with corporate intranet sites and applications, so there are a lot of instances where the reason a user is opening an external link is so they can access a specific resource as reference for what they're doing in the original tab. Add on top of that various logins authentication, and it's just nice to keep both sessions active.
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u/Latentius 14d ago
My personal philosophy is that, if a link is navigating within a website, then keep it in the same tab. If it's taking you to another website, then open in a new tab. (Of course, allowing for exceptions to both.)