When creating a link within a confluence content page incredibly, there is no built in ability to indicate that the link should not open in the same browser session and thereby take the user out of the page that they were looking at when they clicked the link. A common convention has been to provide the ability to indicate in some convenient manner, when defining the link, that it should open in a new browser page without closing the one that the link is presented in. In other products this has been accomplished by allowing the user to select an option to have the link open in a new window or a new tab (I don't really care which). This request is to have that ability made natively available (not via some 3rd party plugin) within Confluence.
The resulting user experience is that when the user clicks the link that the author has provided, the target of the link will open in a different browser tab or window (don't really care which) than the one in which the link was clicked.

There have been similar requests (see CONF-11194 and a veritable trail of tears therein) which perhaps were confusing in the manner in which the request was made.