Don't touch my tabs!

How many times have you clicked on a link and, all of a sudden, one or more tabs start to pop out? I know the answer is many times, as this is a technique often used by advertisers to get their ads in your face.

Or it can also be a trap set by a hacker, that could lead to a fake page and get you in trouble, stealing your credentials or other personal data. Luckily, if you want to add to your security and get rid of those annoying auto-opening tabs, you can start using the Don't touch my tabs! extension.

There is a mechanic that can be activated whenever you click on a hyperlink that opens a page in a new tab. After you click that link, the new page can control what page is loaded in the previous tab.

This procedure can be stopped by adding the rel=noopener attribute to any hyperlink, which will prevent the new window from accessing the previous window element.

But when it was discovered, it came as an optional attribute that developers had to add for every single hyperlink created. This means that millions of hyperlinks that do not have this security feature should be fixed manually. And at this point, such a thing seems kind of hard to accomplish, although it is important.

As some web apps make use of this function already, it could break them if the way hyperlinks work was changed right now. But luckily, Don't touch my tabs! exists.

At its core, it is a very simple browser extension, but it will solve the problem with no other ill effects. All it does is to add the rel=noopener attribute to any hyperlink that tries to open a page in a new tab or window, without breaking anything else.

Don't touch my tabs! allows you to focus on what is important and lets you navigate exactly to the links you click on, instead of having to take care of annoying tabs that keep popping up.