Platform: Brave 1.77.0 on Windows 10 Home x64 22H2
Add a user configurable option: “Give focus on new tab”.
This option would only apply to new tabs opened by the user, like when they click on a hyperlink. It should not override the target attribute in the <A> anchor tag except when target=_blank (open href’ed doc in new tab/window).
Chrome users have asked for this for this option for well over a decade, but Google has been deaf. Some users, especially those clicking on just one hyperlink not dozens of them want to view the new tab now. Not everyone clicks on dozens of hyperlinks to open many tabs at once they view sometime later. Some users want to immediately view the new tab (i.e., have the new tab get focus). Instead they have to resort to installing an add-on in both Brave, Chrome, and Edge, like Tabs to Front v2.
Firefox and Safari have an option to give focus to a newly opened tab. Yes, there is the workaround to use Ctrl+Shift+click, but that adds keystrokes to a mouse click, and is a clumsy workaround since it requires combining 2 input devices (keyboard and mouse). Drilling through context menus is clumsy and non-intuitive.
New-tab-focus should be a user configurable preference. Will Brave ever consider adding this much requested feature, or are users still weeping at a deaf ear? So far from what I’ve seen in other similar threads, Brave’s answer is uninspiring: combine keyboard and mouse. Well, that’s just falling back to how Google decided to do it in Chrome 16 years ago.
I’m trialing Brave trying to find reasons to switch to it, not reasons to stay with Firefox. To switch to Brave as my primary web browser means it must be more than a Chrome clone with integral adblocking since I get that in Firefox with the uBlock Origin full version under Manifest v2 (not its crippled Lite version for Manifest v3 needed for Chromium variants). Mozilla says they will indefinitely support both Manifest v2 and v3. Someone here mentioned new-tab-focus is an option in Vivaldi, and that is a Chromium variant, so it seems plausible the same could be added to Brave.
If an add-on can do it, tab focus can be done natively by the web browser. Brave is a Chromium variant, but it could also adds its own chrome (small “c”) with additional features and functions. Since this has been requested for many years for Brave, what might be Brave’s reason for ignoring the requests? Maybe there is something nasty that could happen with such an override that we users do not realize, but I’ve not yet seen that explanation.