Better than Nutella is Nutello: The New Tab Link Opener

Have you had the problem where, on a website, you click on a link to another site — but you’re still focused on your primary site; you just find the link secondarily interesting — and the new site opens in the same window as the main site, thus losing your place on the site and adding some annoying time to reload the page when you go back?

Yes, we have that problem too. Every day. More like dozens of times every day. Perhaps hundreds. It feels like a less adrenaline-fueled version of Rusian roulette: will it open a new tab or open up on the same window? Click!

Indeed, this problem is endemic to one of the tools we used the most: Jira. Jira, as you probably know, is a world-class issue tracking software that we live off of here at UV. (And if you didn’t know that, you should!) Every day, I’m assigned dozens of Jira tickets and what happens? This one includes a link to a screenshot, that one a link to the page in question, the other one a link to some documentation. And every time, it opens in the same window — so now, I need to not only remember to click back when I’m done (due to my usage pattern — a common usage pattern — of using open tabs as a sort of bookmark of what I need to get back to, to read, or to work on later) but now it interrupted my flow reading the Jira ticket!

A problem, indeed!

What’s the solution? A Chrome Extension that we built internally, which is the New Tab Link Opener — that we call by its acronym, Nutello.

Nutello, in short, ensures that all links to any other site go to a new tab. Thus solving this problem in one delicious scoop… Ah, woops (Freudian slip), I mean in one fell swoop.

It does have some more advanced options. You can apply it to all links on the page, not just external ones.

My personal favorite feature is that it can add a little icon to each external link, to warn you that it will go to a new tab.

Of course, as lovers of music, while our team worked on Nutello, we listened to music. In our Age of the Quarantine, we didn’t listen together but instead independently. Here’s what each of us listened to while we made this extension:

🎵 Jorge Palomar (lead developer) listened to the Bee Gee’s “How Deep Is Your Love”

🎵 Agustina Alvarez (lead designer) listened to Brandon Flowers’s “Crossfire”

🎵 JJ Segado (just a guy) listened to DMA’s cover of Madonna’s “Beautiful Stranger”

🎵 Morgan Friedman (just another guy) listened to Brigitte Bardot’s “Tu veux ou tu veux pas”

PS: UV is one of the world’s leading Salesforce Commerce Cloud (Demandware) development & strategy teams. Contact us to see how we can work together.