The default was the same tab until Firefox 88. They changed it to a new tab to match Chrome. And removed the same tab option because they couldn't imagine why anyone would want it.[1]
Yeah I did that all the time and the recent change was a regression to me. Now with Firefox 90 I can finally comfortably open things in a background tab again.
Thanks for the Bugzilla link. It’s making me think that I should log in to my Bugzilla account more often and look out for issues/requests such as this one.
It’s not uncommon for image-hosting sites to use width and height attributes or max-height/max-width styles to get browsers to display high resolution images at a smaller size than the native image (I can often tell by how long it takes for the images to load in the browser). I liked being able to right-click on a image and click the “View image” option from the context menu to open the image in the same tab – at its native resolution. On the much rarer occasion, where there were multiple images on the same page, it was useful to be able to middle-click to open the image in a new background tab.
I was annoyed that they removed this ability in Firefox 88 but now I’m doubly disappointed to discover that the reason was to be more like Chrome. It seems kind of pointless to break decades old functionality just so that there’s even less to differentiate Firefox from competing browsers. I understand that it’s good to maintain consistent UI but just because other mainstream browsers change decades-old behaviour in a particular way doesn’t mean that all browsers should do so. Having said that, Mike Hoye provides a reasoned rationale¹ for many of the recent Firefox UI changes that have annoyed and frustrated long-time Firefox users.
At least now, with Firefox 90, they’ve changed the new image tab from being a foreground tab to a background tab: this should be less annoying.
On a related note, I’ve now had enough time to get used to automatically selecting ‘L’ (instead of ‘A’) when I want to copy a URL into the clipboard (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1701324). I can live with – and adapt to – such changes if the original functionality isn’t completely removed.
Also, I ensure that telemetry is switched on so developers are aware that that users make use of such functionality. Though, in this case, they can’t tell the difference between users right-clicking and choosing “View image” because they explicitly wanted the image in the same tab or because it was the default behaviour. Unfortunately, the UX experts seem to have simply divined that the users who were selecting the “View image” option didn’t really want the pre-existing, long-standing behaviour (open in the same tab.
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1699128#c3