Recently, in the comments under a post, I came across this message on HN. To be honest, I was quite surprised and it got me thinking.

Just think about it. For example, you have a personal website that contains links to your profiles and contacts on various services. If you don’t have the target="_blank" attribute, then when I click on a link I can immediately navigate to that service in the same tab.

I may want this for various reasons. For example, my goal is to find your profile on another service and to do that I need to follow a link from your website. In that case, I won’t have to close your website separately afterwards. See what I mean? But at the same time, if I want to stay on your original website, it costs me nothing to open that link in a separate tab.

Of course this is probably a matter of design and everyone is free to do whatever they think is best. But for myself, I have definitely decided to remove this attribute from all links.