Open links in new window

NOTE: This suggestion is for Confluence Cloud. Using Confluence Server? See the corresponding suggestion.

Hi everyone,

I’m Divya and I’m a Product Manager on our Confluence Cloud team. Thank you for your feedback on opening links. We conducted some research to assess link click behavior across products similar to Confluence Cloud and found that the existing link click behavior in Confluence Cloud remains the best choice for most of our users.

This existing default behavior is:

• All links in the editor (i.e. the mode where you can see a toolbar and insert content) will open in a new tab by default.
• All links in the renderer (i.e. the published/saved view of an issue description, comment, etc) will open in the same tab by default.

Reasoning: we assessed multiple approaches and landed on keeping the existing behavior for the following reasons.

For users in the editor:

• We don’t want a user to be moved away from the current work they’re doing so open the link in a new tab by default. This is common behavior.

For users in the renderer:

• Common link-click behavior on the web is to open in the same tab.
• If we open links in a new tab by default, it’s impossible for a user to open the link in the same tab. For opening in same tab by default, however, there are common ways to open in a new tab, like cmd + click (Mac), ctrl + click (Windows & Linux), right click then select open link in new tab, or pressing the middle button on a mouse.
• From an accessibility standpoint it is better to stick with the default browser behaviour and open links in the same tab. The main arguments for this are:
  • Assistive technology users can become disoriented when a link opens a new tab or window. They cannot use the back button to return to their previous location. We want to minimize this as much as possible. We have a toolbar button for opening links in the editor to give those with accessibility needs guidance that a new tab is opening.
  • People with mobility or dexterity issues who rely on a keyboard may find it difficult or painful to perform additional navigation tasks.

For both the renderer and editor:

• We decided against giving user-level control of how their links open when clicked. Aside from the accessibility and other reasons mentioned above, we believe this could cause confusion to consumers of the content. This is because every link could hypothetically open in a different way. It wouldn’t afford the consumer of the content a predictable experience when clicking on a link.

I recognize this won’t be the decision a number of you had hoped for, and I’m sorry for that. It’s what we believe is the best decision, for the majority of our user base, with the current information we were able to seek.

Based off this decision, I’ll be closing this ticket and marking it as “Closed”. We’re always looking to reassess and improve our experiences. If new information comes to light that suggests we should iterate this approach, we’ll definitely reconsider.

Thanks again for your feedback.

Divya | PM, Confluence Cloud

Hi everyone,

Thank you for your ongoing feedback on this issue. On behalf of the Confluence team I would like to apologize for the changing status of this request. After many hours of discussion with design and product management, and after some engineering prototyping and testing, we have decided to close this issue as we do not plan to release this feature.

We aim to make our users' experience as friction-free as possible, and although being able to control the ways of opening links would be useful to many of you, it could easily lead to an inconsistent experience for users.

If your use of Confluence is in fact enhanced by opening particular links in a new window/tab then please consider using one of the existing solutions from our Marketplace (unfortunately they're not available for Cloud instances):

• ServiceRocket Linking Plugin
• External Link Add-on

Cheers,

Adam Barnes
Confluence Product Manager