I do wish that opening links in Lemmy opened them in a new browser tab (as is done in Mastodon) rather than opening them in the same tab.

1. PR adding this feature has already been merged.
2. Why the hell would you be against the option to open links in a new tab? You can decide how you want links to open, it's not like the ability to open links in the same tab will disappear.

Upon re reading my comment of which you are replying still seems clear to me, so perhaps you meant to tag another user in your reply, but I'll do my best to clarifiy optional if that was unclear in my wording:

If a webpage has a hyperlink that includes the Target attribute, or onclick=window.Open javascript call, intended to force the user to utilize a different tab/window than the current one to access the webpage being linked to, I would want an option for a USER to force the browser to use the same Window AND tab. In my experience browsers don't provide such an option to users, and as such in order to give our user the option of either open in new tab or open in same tab, based on their preference, keeping the hyperlinks set to open in same tab, ensures both options exist as most browsers have an option available be right-click/long-click to open in new tab.

I know I end up with way too many tabs open. So many pages defaulting to opening links in new tab is part of the reason this happens, and it uses significantly more resources since now-a-days most browsers start a new process for each tab, so as to keep the rest of your tabs working if the content of one tab causes the process to crash. I feel like Wikipedia is the only website I use on a regular basis that doesn't ever open links in new tabs, and that makes me sad.

Oh!oh! I know a browser! Chrome.