This used to be an experimental feature in Chrome under chrome://flags but it is no more. With this Chrome extension, if you click a link to an existing tab, instead of opening a second tab, it will simply bring that tab to the front.

Download it from its page on the Chrome Store.

In your slides, give your links a class of tab-link like so:

<a href="http://my.awesomelink.com/" class="tab-link">Here's an example</a>

For convenience, the console will print all of the tab-link items in your deck so you can cmd-click to pre-load them. Why not make this list prettier in the popup window on the Chrome icon? Links in the popup.html file will always close the popup window after you click. That makes opening a ton of links very annoying.

Let's say you want to show off some interactive websites during your presentation. It's easiest if you build your presentation in HTML but embedding full web sites into your presentation is going to look ugly. Who wants to see a full website inside of a slide? Their design might clash with your background color / headers. Worse still, depending on the resolution of the projector, who knows how it will end up displaying? Also, embedding a ton of websites into one tab is a recipe for Chrome slowing way down.

The semi-solution: Open up your example websites as separate tabs. The problem with that is it leaves you hunting for all these tabs in the middle of your presentation. And if you're in "Presentation mode" in Chrome, the menu animation is super swanky, yet distracting.

The better solution: Pre-load your example pages as separate tabs, as you normally would, and put hyperlinks to those pages in your presentation. When you get to that example, click on the link (it could be an image so it looks nice), and the already loaded tab will come to the front. To quickly get back to your slides, assuming your presentation is in the first tab position, hit cmd-1 and you're back!

This is my first Chrome extension, built mostly out of procrastination of not working on my actual presentation. Suggestions welcome.