Open a Window

It’s time to go and log in to the system to do the thing. You go to the site, click the “login” link, and it opens a new tab or window. Annoyed, because you often have too many open tabs, you close off the previous tab before you forget about it.

You fill out the login form, and after hitting “submit”, you get an old school alert reprimanding you to disable your “popup blocker” (whatever that is) so that the site functions correctly, and upon clicking “close”, it opens another new window/tab where you’re logged in. Irritated, you go back and close the window with the login form, and then try to remember what you came here to accomplish.

This is a sadly common antipattern which seems to exist both on sites that “work best in Internet Explorer” because they haven’t been updated in the last 15 years, and certain types of corporate cultures: The flow above describes both logging into our school district’s system for various things, and the process of logging into my mortgage service provider’s system (without also describing their annoyingly complex multifactor challenge).

I don’t know why the people who made these systems think it’s okay to leave a trail of window/tab litter in their wake. I’d chalk it up to some clueless senior executive “leveraging brand synergy”, but that doesn’t explain the decision by the vendor of the school system. Perhaps it’s old advice still taken as gospel.

Popup blockers aren’t really a thing anymore — functionality that started in browser extensions to reign in excesses of website overreach has been built directly into browsers. I don’t have a “popup blocker” – I have a modern web browser with default settings.

Whatever the case, I’d love to have a setting in my browser that prevented sites from opening new windows/tabs. You can write a userscript to do this sort of thing, but it’s a convoluted workaround to something that should be a checkbox, and forcing a link to stay in the current tab/window should be just as easy to use as holding down a key to open a link in a new tab.

Open tab management is a real problem, especially for people with ADHD. I would estimate that at the exact moment I am writing this I have between 400-500 tabs open, but it’s hard to say for sure. Litter from sites like this does not help – I have discovered months-old open tabs from sites which behave this way.