Audible.com did a crummy thing with their recent site redesign. They made all links into javascript actions.

This poses various usability issues (right-o – if you’ve turned off javascript, you’re out of luck). The biggest issue for me, though, is that this keeps me from opening links on the site into new tabs/windows. If you experience the Web in a single window, sans tabs, you might not even notice that there’s a problem. When I’m browsing a commerce site, I like to open links to products I may be interested in into a new tab. This lets me keep one tab open to the product list, avoiding excessive back-button usage. It also helps me zip through a product list opening products into new tabs so that I can use the tabs as a sort of “browse queue” of things that looked interesting.

Apparently I wasn’t the only one that found this to be a pain. Paul Roub has created a nice little Greasemonkey script that turns the links into tabable (and permalinkable) links. Nifty.

If you’re unfamiliar with Greasemonkey, it’s a Firefox extension that lets you manipulate the behavior of any site. Here’s a brief tutorial…