Marco Arment on forcing a link to open in a new tab or window (emphasis is mine):
Most people know how to open your article’s outbound links in new tabs or windows, especially readers of a tech site. Modern browsers make multiple-tab/window management very easy for almost everyone who wants them, and the people who don’t know how to manage them usually don’t want them.
Up until last year I would have agreed with him.
What changed was watching a friend browsing the web and noticing that they never opened links in new tabs, even though it would have made things easier. I asked if they were familiar with using the middle click on a mouse to open the link in a new tab ( this was Firefox on a Windows system ). I wasn’t surprised when I got a no back.
I took a few minutes to walk them through middle clicking to open links in a new tab and general tab management. They were thrilled with this new piece of information, declaring how much this had changed ( for the better ) their web browsing experience.
This is only one data point, but it reminded me to very careful about my assumptions of what people know, especially for things that I take for granted. The little voice in your head that says “everyone knows that” can easily be wrong.
It simply isn’t true that every single Internet user has already made up their own personal policy on forcing links to open in a new tab or window. In some cases they didn’t even realize they had that feature in the first place.
For web sites with a mostly technical audience I think Marco is right, those are visitors who likely already know what they want and don’t want. But believe it or not there are still people who use computers and browsers to do things that don’t involve reading about computers and browsers.