MMB behaviour on Google in IE8 is erratic!

March 3, 2010 2:57 PM

Middle Mouse Button Misbehavin', only on Google, only with IE8! What gives??

Hello, folks! I hope you're all having a wonderful week so far! Got a very specific, really weird browsing thing going on here and hoping someone might have a suggestion!

Here's the deal. I upgraded to Win7 Pro x64 like a month ago and it's great. Everything works perfectly, except for one very specific, very tiny thing: Clicking links with my middle-mouse button ONLY ON GOOGLE. On every other page on the internet that I have tried, when I middle-click on a link, it opens the link in a new tab (as it should). However, when I middle-click a link on Google, it only SOMETIMES opens the link in a new tab, and sometimes will open the link in the same tab I am working in, as if I had left-clicked.

WHAT. THE. HELL.



I have checked the following things:

1) Replaced the mouse (Old = Logitech MX510, New = Logitech G500), as MX510 not listed as "Win7 compatible" (even though it works fine)
2) Installed the Logitech Setpoint in an attempt to verify/customize MMB behaviour (previously used NO Logitech software)
3) Tested Google with Firefox 3.6, unable to reproduce the problem.
4) Tested IE8 with Yahoo.com, Altavista.com, Bing.com, unable to reproduce problem.
5) Control+left-clicked on Google links with IE8, unable to reproduce the problem.


...I have no toolbars installed or anything wacky. IE8's popup blocker is on, but turning it off has no effect. AntiVirus is ESET Smart Security 4. I'm not clicking the links too fast or something weird like that, because sometimes it happens on the first link I middle-click.

Obviously, I have already discovered a couple ways to work around the issue, but the perfectionist in me wants to fix it for real!

Thank you, one and all, for reading this and for any input you give.
Cheers!

posted by Jinkeez to Computers & Internet (2 answers total)

Best answer: Just guessing, but I know Google does some funny JavaScript when you click links on some of its search results pages, to change the link at the last minute to go through a redirect on Google's server. From my web dev experience, this sort of thing often breaks "new tab" behavior in one browser or another.

You could try disabling JavaScript to test whether this is the issue. I don't have any workarounds to offer other than the ones you know (like, use a different browser).
posted by mbrubeck at 6:26 PM on March 3, 2010

Response by poster: Wow, who knew IE8 would barf on something so simple? I use Firefox and IE8 about equally between home and work and was always too lazy to bother messing with installing more browsers. Thanks for the suggestion, mbrubeck, disabling JavaScript makes the problem go away, which at least lets me know what the problem IS. :)
posted by Jinkeez at 7:31 PM on March 3, 2010