Hopefully someone else is saved by reading this.

We encountered an issue with webkit based browsers doing:

window.open("webpage.htm", "_self");

The browser would lockup and die if we had too many DOM nodes. When we switched our code to following the accepted answer of:

location.href = "webpage.html";

all was good. It took us awhile to figure out what was causing the issue, since it wasn't obvious what made our page periodically fail to load.

I know that this question is uber old, but it perfectly described the problem I needed answered, and I was able to come up with a decent solution, so I thought I'd post it here. It's an interesting workaround.

Essentially you set a timeout to delay forwarding the current page to the new url, and then open the current url in a new tab. So:

function open_hidden_tab(new_url) {
    var thisTimeout= setTimeout(function() {
        window.location.href= new_url;
    }, 500);
    var newWindow= window.open(window.location.href);
    if(!newWindow) {
        clearTimeout(thisTimeout);
        alert('Please allow pop-ups on this site!');
    }
}
open_hidden_tab('https://google.com');

Obviously, you should show some kind of error message on your site instead of using the annoying alert function, but it works for the purposes of this example.

Hope this helps someone!

windows.open() opens the URL in a new window.

To replace the URL in the current window, use:

window.location.href = 'http://example.com';