Opening Link in a New Tab Should NOT be an “Advanced” Feature

Came here to complain about the same thing. This is a horrific waste of time and an incredibly poor addition to user experience.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 3 months ago by rachel.

Hello!

I’m a product manager at a news publisher and wanted to note here that two members of our staff have complained about this change since we updated to WP 6.3 yesterday.

Setting links to open in a new tab is a frequent practice for them and this change adds considerable time spent on a repetitive task each day.

You are not alone.

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/52216 has more information on the matter, but basically it’s really hard to code this and make it functional for all, but the devs know and are trying to make it a better experience. The good news is the next major release of WP should have a better (and more consistent) experience. The fix just didn’t get in, in time ??

I came here to complain about the same thing. I don’t understand why things get “fixed” that aren’t broken. They are changed for change’s sake and it just makes it worse, less usable and less convenient.

The entire hyperlink interface is terrible now. When you go to insert a new link, there’s no enter or confirm button so you have to press Enter to set it. Why remove the redundancy? And now, getting to the new tab/nofollow/sponsored options takes three clicks instead of one. Then there’s some kind of awkward spacing going on so it just looks aesthetically worse than it did before.

Here’s another thing I noticed: when you type something in the link field and it populates posts and pages that match that input, it used to show the whole title. Now, the titles are TRUNCATED so sometimes you don’t even know what it refers to. What goes through the mind of WP devs when they make these senseless changes?

Just wanted to add to the voices asking that this be fixed ASAP. Everything was better about the old setup — perhaps just a reversion to that instead of trying to fix the new? Certainly, that “next version” needs to refer to 6.3.1. Thank you!

I really do not understand why programmers feel like then need to hide features. Accessing this setting now requires an additional click. Whoever approved this update is certainly not a user. Restore the previous behavior.

I’m here to complain about the same thing. It’s so annoying going through an update and “here’s a screen telling you how EVEN MORE amazing the interface is compared to last time!” and supposedly it’s so streamlined to use etc etc etc then… this. We discover that something that worked fine has disappeared. This is NOT streamlined. It’s so many extra clicks and is so unnecessary. It’s made the user experience worse!

Hi, it seems we all have the same problem. Since the new update was released it has become practically impossible to add a new link, as adding nofollow and opening in a new tab is practically essential! Every time I have to add a link I want to cry. However, I found that users and developers are discussing this thing on the official forum, even though there seems to be no chance of getting it back to how it was before, which worked great. It seems that they really want to make it more complicated.

Perhaps it is better if any of us can bring their own contribution, feedback or experience by directly contributing to the project, since wordpress is based on voluntary contributions and the feedback of each of us is essential, for example here:

https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/52799
https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/50891

For those who, like me, publish over twenty articles a day, inserting links (“open in new tab”) becomes a four times onerous operation: insert link, confirm, modify link, advanced, new tab.
It does not make sense

Glad to see I am not the only one who cannot fathom why this change was made. What a regressive step.

Same problem.

It’s a waste of time.

Wasn’t fixed in 6.3.1 update, maybe in 6.4 update in November-ish?

If they want to keep it under ‘Advanced’ menu, can you at least add the ‘Advanced’ menu into the initial link dialogue box?

If you activate the Gutenberg plugin (Version 16.5.1), the checkbox is back:

I have – and still have – the same issue, but also the statement that you hit “enter” to create the link is WRONG. I’m a novice and eventually realised this simply cleared the entry: you have to click “link”. Unfortunately Alvaro has confused me further: I thought Gutenberg was an integral part of WP and you did not have to use a plugin. I use Gutenberg happily but when I looked for the plugin to update it I cannot find it in my list of plugins. And I still have to put up with the useless extra steps to implement a simple thing like opening in a new tab.

Hi @107balgrayhill

I thought Gutenberg was an integral part of WP and you did not have to use a plugin. I use Gutenberg happily but when I looked for the plugin to update it I cannot find it in my list of plugins. And I still have to put up with the useless extra steps to implement a simple thing like opening in a new tab.

I can definitely understand the confusion – the relationship between Gutenberg and the main editor is a bit of a unique one.

Essentially the Gutenberg plugin includes updates to the editor every 2 weeks, and then each major WordPress release (about every ~4 months) includes all the Gutenberg updates from across that period.

So without the Gutenberg plugin – the editor would remain the same between WP 6.3 and 6.4. But if you were to install the Gutenberg plugin – you would get the incremental updates every 2 weeks (including the changes to the link tool).

If you’re not seeing Gutenberg as installed yet – you’ll need to go to Plugins > Add New in your admin menu and you’ll find it there to install.