The Curiosity of _blank Anchor Tags

I'm often curious how so many websites still serve anchor <a> tags with targets set to "_blank".

I recently started browsing through www.104.com.tw, and was horrified to see how many times I was forced onto a new tab. A quick analysis showed me that 43% of the links on my profile editing page had a blank target set. ermahgerd.

This leads me to wonder if this is a conscious decision of the 104 developers. As a user I am consciously deciding my target on every single mouse click on an anchor/link. If I want it open in a new tab, then I middle-click (or ctrl-click),.. the ability to choose a new tab vs. current tab has long been given to me and the rest of the users of the world,.. why would some websites still decide to try force the user to use a new target?

I ran the following snippet of Javascript over a small sample of websites (some from Alexa top 10, some drawn from a hat).
Resulted in this log of results, which I've tried to summarize below.

The average use of _blank targets per country looked something like this for my sample:

Now I understand my sample is small (<50 pages); Edge cases may be skewing the statistic, but I it's fairly evident that some countries are definitely more accustomed to closing browser tabs than middle-clicking their mouse.

The top 13 results from my sample (excluding search result pages) looked like this:

Looking past the fact the top few sites have such a huge ratio of _blank targeted links, it's amazing that on the landing page of these Chinese sites the links number in the order of thousands.

It was also interesting comparing Bing's, Yahoo's and ebay's localized sites across the countries in question. It seems these sites have tailored their UX appropriately for their market.

Bing

Yahoo

ebay

If I had time to do this again properly, I would like to automatically crawl a more substantial sample of sites. The manual nature of my data-capture forced my sample to be focused and probably unfit for using in any real diagnosis.

Here's a good article to read. Agree or disagree with the use-cases, either way I hope more developers choose to use blank or new targets more appropriately.