onclick="window.open(this.href);return false">original publication</a>.

I often visit web sites that will, when a link is clicked or an action takes place, a new browser window will appear with the content of the URL or the desired action (such as when paying a bill there is redirect to another vendor who then handles the transaction). A couple of days ago, I tried to pay a bill and Firefox gave me a blank window but inspecting it via "command-u" shows that HTML is there. When I did it through Safari it worked. Today I wanted to get to a ProQuest database through a link provided by UCLA's library and I got the same result: a blank window with HTML code showing up when "command-u" is used. Surprisingly, pasting the link in a new browser window did produce the content. But the original blank browser window would not display anything even if it is re-loaded. Both of the actions I describe are produced by scripts at these two very different sites but the response of Firefox is the same: a blank browser window. To isolate it, I tried the simplest: I used window.open in my work web site to send the visitor to the original publisher of my work. An example of such approach is the following snippet: <a href="http://link.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v72/p1658" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false">original publication</a>. Clicking on the link used to open a new browser window at aps.org. But now it does not do this after upgrading to 40.0.+ (currently at 40.0.3). This is, as far as I know, a "supported" HTML call. And it works for 39.0.0 down to 34.0.5 (could have gone furtherback but I did not see the point). I think this is a major flaw with 40.0.+ and needs to be fixed as soon as possible. Thank you for reading this far. (This post was made from a Mac Pro [Xeon], kept at 10.6.8 for complicated reasons. But the results are identical under 10.10.3 elsewhere.)