Chrome extension; open a link from popup.html in a new tab

You should use chrome.tabs module to manually open the desired link in a new tab. Try using this jQuery snippet in your popup.html:

$(document).ready(function(){
   $('body').on('click', 'a', function(){
     chrome.tabs.create({url: $(this).attr('href')});
     return false;
   });
});

See my comment https://stackoverflow.com/a/17732609/1340178

I had the same issue and this was my approach:

1. Create the popup.html with link (and the links are not working when clicked as Chrome block them).
2. Create popup.js and link it in the page: <script src="popup.js" ></script>

3. Add the following code to popup.js:

   document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function () {
       var links = document.getElementsByTagName("a");
       for (var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
           (function () {
               var ln = links[i];
               var location = ln.href;
               ln.onclick = function () {
                   chrome.tabs.create({active: true, url: location});
               };
           })();
       }
   });
   

That's all, links should work after that.