[whatwg] Proposal for Links to Unrelated Browsing Contexts

[Glenn Maynard]

On Mon, Oct 1, 2012 at 8:37 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> > The all-too-common bad reason is "we want people to keep pages open in
> > the user's browser for long as possible in the hopes that it'll make
> > them come back by accident, so we'll sprinkle target=_blank everywhere",
> > eg. amazon.co.jp makes *every search result* target=_blank.)  This is
> > abused so constantly that I disable it with browser.link.open_newwindow
> > in FF.
>
>
> Presumably authors in such cases would not use rel=noreferrer; I don't see
> why they would want to.
>

The only issue I'm concerned with is encouraging yet more target=_blank
misuse by encouraging people to use it where opening a new window isn't
genuinely appropriate to the UI.  As long as there aren't security reasons
to want a new browsing context, that's fine.  It does seem orthogonal:

>  Primary goals:
 >  + have the new page use a different event loop if possible (new process)
 >  + have the window of the new page not be able to reach the opener via
>     a named window.open() or target=""
>
 > As a result, I think these are also necessary features:
> ...
 >  + have the new page be in a new browsing context

It doesn't seem like you need a new browsing context to achieve both of the
above.  (Maybe it's easier to implement in today's multi-process browsers,
if you happen to be opening a new tab at the same time you start a new
process, but that seems like an implementation detail.)

-- 
Glenn Maynard