Thenoopener keyword for therel attribute of the<a>,<area>, and<form> elements instructs the browser to navigate to the target resource without granting the new browsing context access to the document that opened it — by not setting theWindow.opener property on the opened window (it returnsnull).

This is especially useful when opening untrusted links, in order to ensure they cannot tamper with the originating document via theWindow.opener property (seeAbout rel=noopener for more details), while still providing theReferer HTTP header (unlessnoreferrer is used as well).

Note that whennoopener is used, nonempty target names other than_top,_self, and_parent are all treated like_blank in terms of deciding whether to open a new window/tab.

This page was last modified onJul 9, 2025 byMDN contributors.