On the Edit User Profile page, prevent losing data when clicking links

[ashokrane]

On the Edit User Profile, open the "You can change your profile picture on Gravatar." link in a new window.
Reason being that otherwise it causes the user to loose any data that they have edited in the form, but not yet saved.

[swissspidy]

Hey there,

Thanks for your report and welcome!

As per #23432, we rather strive to remove usage of target="_blank". As for losing data, the browser should warn you when you're about to leave a page without having saved the form.

See https://core.trac.wordpress.org/query?keywords=~target-blank for related tickets.

[ashokrane]

Thanks @swissspidy. I agree. The browser didn't throw any warning when I have unsaved data & when I clicked on the "Gravatar" text. Doing that would be a better approach then opening in a new window (after going through other related tickets).

[ajmaurya]

Hey i also once had the same thought on opening the Gravatar link in a new window, but after reading this it totally makes much more sense now.

[afercia]

Discussed during today's accessibility bug-scrub, agreed this form would need the JS confirm to warn users they can lose data when navigating away. No target _blank please :)

[karlijnbk]

Regarding the patch above, please also give props to @diedeexterkate.

The patch above fixes the issue on the user edit pages and "add new user" page. We tested this on Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Safari on macOS.
Important to note that in Safari this does not work. We think this is due to back-forward caching (see ​https://stackoverflow.com/questions/40938707/safari-onbeforeunload/41769343).