Why fake a link?

In Google Analytics there are a lot of tables where you can click a link to see content details. These links only work if you left-click. If you right-click to open the link in a new tab or window, you’ll end up opening the current Google Analytics screen again.

I find this extremely annoying because this is precisely the usage scenario where browser tabs are really handy. If you’re looking at an overview with links to additional details, you really need to be able to open them in multiple new tabs of windows so that you can quickly look through them instead of having to wait for each page to load when you go back and forth between the overview list and the details pages.

Here’s the html source for the example above.

<a href="" onclick="window.PageTable._drillDown(2); return false;">
/2007/06/flex-can-t-do-rest</a>

I’m wondering why people do this? What’s the reason for using JavaScript here? Why not just use a real link instead of a fake one?