I’ve always hated when links open in new windows (usually by adding a target="_blank" attribute). Except in a few very rare instances, there’s just no reason to do it. Firefox allows the user to disable this behavior, but the procedure is not very well documented, so it seems like every time I want to do it I need to spend 10 minutes searching the web. So, I’m documenting it here in my somewhat-neglected blog. This procedure is valid for Firefox 2.x:

1. Point the browser to about:config
2. Find the property browser.link.open_newwindow
3. Right-click on it and select “modify”
4. Change the value to “1”
5. Restart the browser

And there we have it. Another victory in the battle to make the web less annoying.