I’ve been seeing this far too often. At first I only noticed it on sites that were trying to be too flashy at the expense of usability. Then I saw it on YouTube and realized that there’re plenty of bright people who’ve had this fly way over their heads.

It shouldn’t be this hard: When users middle-click or control-click a link, they expect the page to load in a new tab. When you deny users this browser-provided feature which works everywhere else on the web, they are left with only a few options. In order of highest likeliness:

• Put up with your awful design: “Oh well, now I have to click back to get to the index.”
• Do it the hard way: “At least I can still right-click > Open in new tab.”
• Sic NoScript on you: “Just another kid playing with Javascript.”
• Leave your site: Really though, nobody’s going anywhere over this.

No, your users aren’t too stupid to use tabs. No, it’s not going to overload your server. No, removing expected, useful, and unobstrusive features is not clean design (unless you’re Apple, of course). No matter what contrived excuses you can muster up, you are ultimately spitting in the face of the rest of the web. There’s a reason we don’t block right-click menus, add strange styles to links, or abuse imagemaps anymore: everyone finally realized that the web is a much nicer place when we use a standard interface and stop reinventing the wheel.

I expect some of this coming from people attempting to simply create an attractive interface, but I never expected Google to essentially remove such a basic navigation feature from one their core products.