It came as a nice surprise to me that clicking the scroll wheel in between the right & left mouse buttons while positioned on a link can open that in a new tab. I found this feature working on all the popular browsers - IE (version 8), Firefox (version 3), Opera (version 9.6), Safari on Windows (version 4) & Chrome (version 5)
Also see:
HOW to continuously refresh any web-page in IE8 & Firefox60