How To Make Links Open In The Background With Firefox & Chrome

Do you regularly browse through emails or RSS feeds and cue up links in your browser to read later? As you do that, you may often find yourself distracted by your browser popping up in the foreground or by the focus being stolen by a new tab. Whether you’re using webmail, a desktop email client or an RSS feed reader, there are tricks and techniques to make links open in the background. This article shows you how to tame foreground-seeking links in Firefox and provides some tips on how to deal with Chrome.
If you’re opening links from outside your browser, it doesn’t matter where you open them from. You could be clicking on a link in either Thunderbird, a PDF document, or another program. What does matter is your default browser.

Firefox

There is a simple tweak that allows you to force Mozilla Firefox to open ‘diverted’ links in the background. Note that this will affect all links, including those opened from within the browser!
Go to Firefox and type > about:config into the URL bar. Hit Enter and you will likely encounter a warranty warning. Fear not! Just promise to be careful and proceed.

Next you will see a long list of advanced settings. You can > Filter for > browser.tabs or simply scroll to the entry > browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground. Double-click this entry to set its value to > true. To revert the change, simply double-click again. Done.

As you can see from the screenshot above, there is an option to also make your bookmarks load in the background. Furthermore, note that you can make links from within the browser load in a new tab in the background if you perform a middle-click, typically using the scroll wheel of your mouse.

Chrome

If you decided to go with Google Chrome as your default browser, the whole scenario becomes a little more complicated. In short, there is no straightforward way to make all links open in the background. But at least there are some workarounds for some scenarios.
As with Firefox, you can use a middle-click to make links from within Google Chrome open in a new tab in the background. When you’re dealing with outside browser applications however, there doesn’t seem to be a solution at all.
Now if you’re using Google Reader and love your keyboard shortcuts, i.e. clicking [V] to open the current article in a new tab, there is a way to make the tab open in the background, which doesn’t require your mouse. In fact, there are three extensions able to do this and they all work equally well:

• Google Reader: Open in background tab
• Google Reader Open entry in background tab
• ShyTab.

If you’re looking for a more general solution, check out this extension, which will force all links that contain a _new or _blank cue in the target to open in a new background tab when you left-click them.
This being Chrome, you don’t have to restart your browser to install new extensions. In order to make the new extension work, however, be sure to reload the respective tab before trying.

Internet Explorer

Not surprisingly, there is no way to make links open in the background when links outside Internet Explorer are clicked. You can, however, use the middle-click or a [CTRL] plus left-click to open links from within the browser in a new tab in the background. In any case, please don’t use Internet Explorer as your default browser!

The Verdict

Taken together, it’s rather surprising that (of these three browsers) Firefox is the only one able to perform such an essential and simple task! Furthermore, the fact that the option is available natively, shows that the Mozilla core developing team is listening much better to its audience than Google or Microsoft. So if you find links opening in the foreground annoying, then your best bet is to make Firefox your default browser.
Do you use another browser, for example Opera, and do you happen to know how to make links open in the background? Please share your solution in the comments!