Update 06/16/2009: With the release of iPhone OS 3.0, this tip is no longer necessary. With 3.0, simply tap and hold any link to bring up an option to, among others, “Open in New Page”. I’ll leave this up for posterity, and for those of you that have not upgraded yet.
After experiencing and thoroughly enjoying the iPhone for the weekend, I’ve found that one of my biggest gripes is that there’s no “Open in New Tab” command, which makes all the sense in the world since there is no right click anywhere in the OS.
Still, one of my favorite hobbies is to peruse Daring Fireball for the latest in Apple news, and open each linked article in a new tab behind my active tab so I can finish reading the site. It got to be too tedious to do this with iPhone, since every time I clicked on an outside link, it took me completely out of the site, and completely out of the experience.
So I took it upon myself to jerry-rig up a solution. I’ve created a small bookmarklet that grabs all links in a page, and forces them to… um, open in a new window. Wait! Don’t throw that tomato at me yet! Normally this would be absolute madness to unleash this upon the web, but iPhone in its infinite simplicity treats target=”blank” as a trigger to open a new tab. Tiny annoyance solved!
The easiest way to do this is to open safari, and drag the bookmarklet (linked below) to your bookmarks bar. Then just sync to your iPhone. Now you can trigger new tabs to your heart’s content.
Imagine that, a useful application of target=”blank”. Watch out for flying pigs.
New Tab Bookmarklet:
Update: I’ve added a bookmarklet that does the exact opposite, in case you need an undo. (I needed an undo):
For Example’s Sake:
