About #1 -- even those of us who do have a middle button can have a problem with it .. we may not remember it. Consistency would be nice. Either always open a new tab, or never do, and forget the secret handshakes. Can someone say "My Account" Option, here?
About #2 -- this would beat up on their web server. An easier solution is to pass stuff off to an Alt. Charm has well over a hundred such on an Alt, live and boxed. This speeds up her page loads since she only sees stock she's actively working. If/when she's looking for an old collection cat/box, she logs in to the web site as the Alt, and then doesn't see her active stock.
To be honest, the problem with page load times really isn't the number of cats/boxes on the Pedigree. It's the design of the page. The Pedigree page (the table/list of lives and boxes), at least, only has ONE copy of the information for each. Cattery pages have several.
Here's the suggestions I get for the Pedigree page when I ask for them, with my comments:
Combine external CSS (4) -- reduces network traffic
Combine external JavaScript (8) -- reduces network traffic
Enable gzip compression (12) -- reduces network traffic. tiny hit on processing time at both ends
Leverage browser caching (23) -- huge win here since most stuff never changes
Leverage proxy caching (8) -- big win here since most people don't know they're actually using a proxy
Minimize cookie size -- nah, can't get much smaller but there could be fewer
Serve static content from a cookieless domain (12) -- reduces network traffic
Specify image dimensions (1) -- speeds layout and rendering
Optimize the order of styles and scripts (5) -- allows parallel downloads
Remove unused CSS rules (107) -- mostly noise, some of the rules truly are not used anywhere, though
These, of course, miss the big win you get from not referencing files which don't exist.
And they miss the huge win you get by scrogging the CMS on pages which don't need it.
And they miss the win you get if you use Sprites to combine a number of small images into a larger one.
And they miss the nice improvement you get by compressing your Javascript.
And they miss the big win you get by actually using CSS and Javascript instead of just throwing code at the wall it until it sticks.
The biggest miss, however, is on the Cattery pages where the suggestion is "only send one copy of your data" .. the Cattery pages have several
**falls over into a non computer geek coma**
