Every single time this topic is raised, someone tries to claim there is a work-around, while seemingly forgetting that this is the Safari for Windows forum, and not the Safari for Mac forum.
This is the single biggest glaring omission from Safari for Windows. It completely defeats the purpose of even having tabs, which makes me wonder what in the world were the developers thinking.
Safari is a very pretty and fast browser, but I don't know many people who actually use it on a Windows machine due to the inability to simply open links in a new tab without right clicking or holding some extra button down. It's also the only mainstream browser for Windows that isn't capable of this simple task.
Having watched this issue since Safari 3, without ever seeing any response other then "oh, but just do this work-around" (that only works for Macs), my guess is we'll never see it happen. The funny thing is that when you look at the ini files that can be changed on the Mac version, they are pretty much identical to the Windows version. So, the "fix" not working simply means that whoever was in charge of the part of code related to tabs when porting to Windows must have consciously decided there was no need for the ability to open links in new tabs.
Proving once again that software engineers can be utterly clueless about the usability of their software.