python selenium, open link in new tab without navigating to it

Question

I'm using selenium to do web scraping and I'm trying to use a link to open a tab, whilst staying on the original tab. I have the following:

first_link.send_keys(Keys.CONTROL + Keys.RETURN)

which is meant to open the tab and navigate to it, but it just opens up the link in the original tab. Is there any way to open the link in a new tab, and furthermore, not navigate to it?

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can't avoid switching to the new tab. You may want to set browser.tabs.loadInBackground to true (although that is the default).

Use Keys.CONTROL + Keys.ENTER (and not Keys.CONTROL + Keys.RETURN ).
On Mac, it should be Keys.COMMAND + Keys.ENTER .

After that, to deal with switching between tabs and windows, check out these SO questions:

• Selenium multiple tabs at once
• switch tabs using Selenium WebDriver with Java