How silly of me to suggest to someone who is clearly looking for a better browsing experience a way to achieve it.
I agree with Brion here: enforcing new windows is not a good way to deal with this issue, especially since forced new windows are very annoying for users who use tabbed browsing (myself included). It could be a preference, but a smarter solution would be to suppress the no-cache header (which is necessary for a good editing experience in some browsers) on the RecentChanges page.
If anyone wants to do this, the code is open to you and fairly easy to understand [1]. It's probably not very high on anyone's priority list. The main problems with RC performance are being addressed by a change that loads the changes from an individual small table, instead of fetching them from the much larger article table. There are many other queries that generate high load on the DB server which need to be located and optimized. These are our real performance bottlenecks.
And if anyone has a lot of time to waste, a client side application that maintains a local RC table and fetches new changes (diffs) within regular intervals would be very neat, and a nice building block for the dedicated WP editor that some people are thinking about. We could help you by exporting our RCs as an XML-based web service ..
Regards,
Erik
[1] Feel free to contact me if you want to delve into it and I'll try to help as much as I can. I can help more if you're using a real OS (Linux,BSD etc.) though, as web development on Win32 is a PITA.