Actually, I occasionally find the IE feature to which Havoc refers vaguely useful… he’s right that it never opens the page you want to go to next, but particularly if it’s a portal, it might well contain a link to one that you do1, and it’s harmless enough if it doesn’t, provided the page load is quickly interruptible. Admittedly you could just Shift-Click the link in the original window to achieve the same effect, but I usually find shortcuts more convenient than modified clicks.
It also reinforces the fact that your browsing history has been carried forward from the previous window– a trick that Firefox would do well to learn.
1The Macintosh version of IE made portal browsing even easier by providing a Page Holder tab in its sidebar that could hold all the links on a page for you, so you didn’t have to keep navigating back and forward… would be nice to see something like that in some other browsers too.
In fact IE inherited this behaviour from Netscape. I guess it was 2.0 which did that too (and before IE).
Testing Netscape 2.02 for Mac, it seems to open new windows to the first URL you loaded in the first window. This behaves like cloning only if loading one URL in one window was the only thing you did before opening a new window. In any case, it doesn’t clone the history.
Safari provides cloning as one of its few prefs (“New windows open with: Same Page”). I find that it’s most useful when I’ve nearly finished entering an advanced search, then realize that (a) I want to try two or more variations of the same search, or (b) I want to go ahead with the search but also go back to something I saw on a previous page. Modifier+click/modifier+Enter for “Send Form in New Window” (consistent with “Open in New Window”) would be an alternative way of satisfying those cases, while perhaps not satisfying others.
Cool, I hadn’t even noticed that “Same Page” was an option in Safari… have turned it on now 🙂 (Is it new in Tiger, or has it always been there…?)