In Angular, if we enable the html5 mode, all href's on the page w ill try to use the html5mode and use the route provider to determine which view should be loaded. In reality, we may need to enable html5 mode on the page but for certain links we want the browser to navigate to the link directly. In HTML5 mode, there are three situations in which the A tag is not rewritten: from the angular docs Links that contain a target attribute. Example: <a href="/ext/link?a=b" target="_self">link</a> Absolute links that point to a different domain Example: <a href="http://angularjs.org/">link</a> Links starting with '/' that lead to a different base path when base is defined Example: <a href="/not-my-base/link">link</a>