How-to prevent Visual Studio from opening a new browser window for ASP.NET MVC application

When you run your webapplication by pressing F5 (Start with debugging) or CTRL-F5(Start without debugging) VS opens a new browser window (on F5) or creates a new tab. It can be somewhat annoying, because after a while your browser’s tab pane becomes full of the same tabs.

Fortunately, we‘re able to change the default behaviour. For the case when you start with debugging, you need to turn off Visual Studio JavaScript Debugging. Go to Tools ->Options and turn off the option Enable JavaScript Debugging for ASP.NET (Chrome and IE). This is how it looks in VS2017:

After altering this option VS won’t open a new browser instance, but it’ll continue to create a new browser tab every time. To fix this, go to the project’s properties and set Start action to Don’t open a page. Wait for a request from an external application: