Opening a New Tab in the Background without Focus Switching

In this question, the user seeks to open a new tab in a separate tab without causing any focus shift to the new tab. They demonstrate an attempt using the open() and focus() methods, but encounter a momentary flash of the new tab before returning to the current tab in Chrome.

However, the provided answer presents an alternative solution using event simulation to bypass this issue.

Custom Event Dispatch

The key to achieving this behavior lies in dynamically creating an element and assigning its href attribute to the desired URL. Subsequently, an event (in this case, a mouse click) is created and initialized with specific parameters, including the "ctrl" key modifier. This emulates the action of holding down the "ctrl" key while clicking on a link, which is the default behavior for opening a new tab in the background.

Implementation

The provided code exemplifies this technique:

function openNewBackgroundTab(){
    var a = document.createElement("a");
    a.href = "http://www.google.com/";
    var evt = document.createEvent("MouseEvents");
    //the tenth parameter of initMouseEvent sets ctrl key
    evt.initMouseEvent("click", true, true, window, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0,
                                true, false, false, false, 0, null);
    a.dispatchEvent(evt);
}

Conclusion

By leveraging event simulation, this solution effectively opens a new tab in the background without affecting the focus of the current tab. This technique is particularly useful for browser extensions or bookmarklets where maintaining focus on the current tab is crucial for a seamless user experience.