I recently had an issue come up about a link on our intranet that I shrugged off as a user error. In the end it was a user error but it was not an end user error it was a developer user error instead.

The intranet was set up by someone else and they used the a href attribute target=_new:

For years I assumed that this was the proper way to open a new window. That was until the issues was brought up to me and a junior developer started telling me how to do stuff. At first I shrugged it off as some weird IE setting because I could not replicate the behavior. The issue came back again so I figured I should get off my ass and look into it a little more.

It turns out the yapping little junior was right but I found the answer here ASPAlliance: Opening Windows: _new or _blank?.

FTA - "the _new targeted link reloads the content of the window it already created"

So if you open a link using "_new" you get a window. If you surf around in the new window and then go back to click the orignal link the already existing window it opened before will be reloaded.