Determine on onclick whether the clicked link is meant to open a new window or tab

Question

Most modern browsers support the commands ctrl+click or command+click or similar to open links in a new tab or a new window.

In an application, I want the link to get disabled on clicking. But only, if the target is the same window (if it, for instance, opens in a new tab, I don't want the link to become disabled since it is reasonable to click it again).

I did some tries and debugged the event object that gets created on click - but I cannot find any information about whether the target is a new tab or a new window.

Known workaround: Certainly it is possible to check whether a certain key had been pressed while clicking a specific link, an easy thing - but since these commands vary from browser to browser and from OS to OS, one would have to define a complicated mapping and who nows exactly what the user has configured and so on.

Is there any reliable way of determining, whether the location should be opened in a new tab or window?

Answer 1

Here you have a working example: http://jsfiddle.net/pioul/eCuNU/4/

This script will allow the click on the link only if the link is going to open in a new tab/window, based on the target="_blank" attribute.

HTML:

<a href="http://google.fr" target="_blank">new window</a>
<a href="http://google.fr" target="_self">same window 1</a>
<a href="http://google.fr" target="">same window 2</a>

jQuery:

$("a").bind("click", function(e){
    if($(this).attr("target") != "_blank"){
        e.preventDefault();
    }
});

EDIT:

You can take into account ctrl+clicks like this:

$("a").bind("click", function(e){
    if($(this).attr("target") != "_blank"){
        if(!e.ctrlKey){
            e.preventDefault();
        }
    }
});