npm package discovery and stats viewer.

Discover Tips

  • General search

    [free text search, go nuts!]

  • Package details

    pkg:[package-name]

  • User packages

    @[username]

Sponsor

Optimize Toolset

I’ve always been into building performant and accessible sites, but lately I’ve been taking it extremely seriously. So much so that I’ve been building a tool to help me optimize and monitor the sites that I build to make sure that I’m making an attempt to offer the best experience to those who visit them. If you’re into performant, accessible and SEO friendly sites, you might like it too! You can check it out at Optimize Toolset.

About

Hi, 👋, I’m Ryan Hefner  and I built this site for me, and you! The goal of this site was to provide an easy way for me to check the stats on my npm packages, both for prioritizing issues and updates, and to give me a little kick in the pants to keep up on stuff.

As I was building it, I realized that I was actually using the tool to build the tool, and figured I might as well put this out there and hopefully others will find it to be a fast and useful way to search and browse npm packages as I have.

If you’re interested in other things I’m working on, follow me on Twitter or check out the open source projects I’ve been publishing on GitHub.

I am also working on a Twitter bot for this site to tweet the most popular, newest, random packages from npm. Please follow that account now and it will start sending out packages soon–ish.

Open Software & Tools

This site wouldn’t be possible without the immense generosity and tireless efforts from the people who make contributions to the world and share their work via open source initiatives. Thank you 🙏

© 2025 – Pkg Stats / Ryan Hefner

safe-target

v1.1.1

Published

Using `target="_blank"` can be insecure. This helps.

Vulnerabilities

Powered byPowered by Snyk
  • 0High
  • 0Medium
  • 0Low

Links

Git

Maintainers

venablesvenables

Keywords

Readme

Safe target="_blank" links

Using target="_blank" can be insecure. Especially if you use these from within a web app.

Wait, what?

Links that are opened using target="_blank" can control the opener tab in some limited ways.

Yes, you read that right. Thank to the window.opener property, new windows have a reference to the window that opened them.

What's the big deal?

Imagine this scenario:

  1. I log in to my favorite web app.
  2. I click over to some section, and click a link to a 3rd party. The developers of the web app don't want me leaving their app, so they made it target="_blank"
  3. Unbeknownst to me, the 3rd party was compromised, and a little bit of javascript was injected into their page. This javascript redirected my original window to a copy-cat page which says I need to log in again.
  4. I close the 3rd party tab, and am back on my original (now "logged out") tab. Everything looks legit, so I log in again.

I just gave some hackers my login information.

If you want to see this in action, check out docs/index.html.

Wow. So how do I fix this?

The solution, it turns out, is pretty simple.

Just add rel="noreferrer" to your links that use target="_blank" (HTML spec)

Simple enough, so why does this library exist?

We're humans, and adding rel="noreferrer" is easy to forget, let alone spell (is that one "r" or two?)

So, just add this script to the bottom of your page, like so:

<html>
<head>
</head>
<body>
  <!-- stuff -->

  <script src="//code.mattvenables.com/safe-target-blank/safe-target-blank.min.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

Installation:

You can install safe-target-blank in several ways:

  1. Include the hosted JS directly on your page

    <script src="//code.mattvenables.com/safe-target-blank/safe-target-blank.min.js"></script>

  2. Install via npm (or yarn), and require it (for use with Webpack or Browserify)

    npm install safe-target
    yarn add safe-target

  3. Install via Bower

    bower install safe-target