Links without target="_blank" attribute is OK. But for links with target="_blank", things are slightly different. Reproduce steps (you can use the test case page in attachment): 1. Open some link with target="_blank" in new tab 2. Switch to the tab, if the link load very slow, you may want to stop wasting time, so let us stop it by hit the stop button. After stopped the slow loading, you may want to copy/sent the link to your friend or network administrator to ask why this link load so slow But it's impossible, the link is lost, only about:blank or nothing left in your location bar If you open link (B) from parent site (A) with target="_blank", firefox will NOT remember the browse session of (B), so you cannot get the url of site (B) if you closed it after you click the link (A). Thus, for those who prefer open a lot of tabs when they browsing, they're very likely encountered such situation: some tabs of theirs load very slow, so they stopped those, but result in many blank tabs without any useful URL. If they forgot where those tabs are from (don't forget that they usually open a LOT of tabs, so this is very likely to happen), they can never know what those tabs were, for what, important or not. The test page offered in the attachment can generate two links of given URL (you entered in the input area, don't forget including http://), one with target="_blank" and one without. You can choose a link that is slow loading for you or you don't have enough time to stop it before the loading complete. The gif animation image offered in the attachment was captured on my own machine. You may noticed that link without target="_blank" is loading slower than the other one, I don't know why.

A demonstration

(In reply to byzod from comment #1) > Created attachment 733769 [details] > A sample > > A demonstration

In Linux, it is the same. It is annoying when working with lots of tabs.

I can reproduce this on a clean win7/firefox22 install