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While browsing a question, I realized I wanted to keep it open in another page in Safari on my iPhone so I could access it later (I keep a number of pages open for future reference).

In order to do so, I held down on the title link, which then prompts me with a number of options (email, open in new page).

However, opening in a new page causes the current page to refresh in the same page, and no new page is opened.

Since the behavior in a desktop browser when middle-clicking/opening in a new tab/page is to honor that intent (opening in a new tab/page), I'd expect it to be honored on the iPhone/smartphone browsers as well.

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It's what happen to me too, with my iPod. –  kiamlaluno Jun 4 '11 at 16:25
[status-repro] on my iPhone. –  Rebecca Chernoff Jun 4 '11 at 16:39
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1 Answer

up vote 7 down vote accepted

This is an iPhone Safari "feature". If the URL that the link points to matches the link of the current page, then the "Open in New Page" feature is ignored and the current page is refreshed.

Because web design standards commonly recommend that navigation elements to the current page from the current page to not be links, it takes a little work to even find a page on other sites that can reproduce this problem. But doing so shows that the behavior is not unique to Stack Overflow.

Here is an example of the same problem on MSDN:

If you navigate to this page on an iPhone and then try to use the "Open in New Page" feature on the List<T> Class in index panel on the left, it exhibits the same behavior.

The only workaround that I can think of (without changing the way that the iPhone Safari works) is to make the link trivially different, e.g. with a query string.

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Ack, what a horrible "feature". Will flag for a moderator to tag as "by-design". –  casperOne Jun 4 '11 at 21:13
Huh, interesting. –  Rebecca Chernoff Jun 4 '11 at 22:25
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