Tabbed browsing, programmatically navigating to another open tab

I'm in a discussion with my co-worker. 开发者_运维知识库 We have a web application in a tabbed browsing environment, say with 2 tabs open. Tab2 has a link to tab1, when I click the link, it opens tab1 in a new tab. We want to detect if tab 1 is already open, if so then set focus to tab1 (and not open a new window).

He has gotten this working in a broswer window environment, but says it is not possible in a tabbed environment.

Is it possible to for javascript to determine if tab1 is already open and then just set focus to that tab?

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It is only possible if the webbrowser is already preconfigured to open links with a target in a new tab instead of new window and sets focus to it itself when you have given the links the same target name.

E.g.

<a href="http://google.com" target="somename">link1</a>
<a href="http://stackoverflow.com" target="somename">link2</a>
<a href="http://xkcd.com" target="somename">link3</a>

In other words: you're dependent on the client/webbrowser used. You have no control over it from the server side on.

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In Firefox for example, the client should have checked both the Open new windows in new tab instead and When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately options to get your requirement to work.

(as you see, the last one is disabled in mine)

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You should instead create a separate document with a DOM-based tab, and iframes pointing to the real pages. Then you could easily set 'focus' to the correct tab when needed.