I use the web version of Slack.
If I open a link to slack in a new window, then this screen appears:
Opening link in Slack ...
You will be redirected in few moments.
Don't have the app yet? Download Slack for Desktop
Or, you can open this link in your browser.
This costs me some seconds and this (...fill in your favorite word) me.
Is there a way to avoid this intermediate page?
All links generated in Slack take you to this intermediate step. Slack requires this page to figure out your user agent / operating system and accordingly triggers a URL handler. If you want to open these links in the web version, then you need to click again on open this link in your browser. You can save this extra click by using a nifty trick:
You can change your user agent to Chrome on Chrome OS. (For different browsers there are various user agent switcher extensions available)
This is the user agent string you can use:
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; CrOS x86_64 10066.0.0) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/84.0.4147.125 Safari/537.36
After making this change, Slack will still have the intermediary page, but it'll automatically redirect you to the web version from there.
Alternatively
This doesn't cover all the cases but all the links in the Slack sidebar take the following format:
https://domain.slack.com/archives/D1234567890
if you replace archive with messages, then the link opens in the web version directly.
https://domain.slack.com/messages/D1234567890
You could devise some keyboard ninja techniques to make this replacement happen automatically once you copy it into your clipboard.
