I am always surprised at

I am always surprised at what things get huge responses... People have been emailing me like crazy about the "links in new windows" thing. Let me clarify: I'm not saying people shouldn't be able to open links in new windows. Why, that'd be crazy! I'm saying that it's not a default behavior, and it shouldn't be forced upon users. If they're advanced and want to do something else, let 'em. But don't force it on the rest of us who want to control our browsing behavior.

Update: For what's it worth, here's how I surf. I tend to right-click on any link on a page full of interesting links, and open the target in a new window. Then, on the last interesting link, I just click on it, so that window will be reused. I go through each of the new windows, reading and closing as I go, until I'm back to my original window, which has loaded the new page while I was reading. On sites where I know a new window will be spawned, I just drag the link to my URL bar to make the browser ignore the new window target for the link.

I'm Anil Dash, and I've been blogging here since 1999, writing about how culture is made. Contact me at anil@dashes.com, at +1 646 833 8659, or at anildash on Twitter or IM. Find out more »

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