Keep Hangouts from opening links inside the same task? I just opened a link to a friend's Medium post inside Hangouts, and when I view all running apps (the recent-tasks list), the task with the Medium post in it is my Hangouts rather than a separate Medium window. Opening Medium, it's doing its own thing. Opening Hangouts, it shows the Medium post -- I can't go look at other chats or anything without closing the Medium post I'm reading. This is frustrating, as I might want to switch between typing comments in Hangouts and reading the article (for example).

I would like more generally to stop apps from doing "this sort of thing" if possible (though I expect this isn't possible). When Twitter introduced an in-app browser, I turned that off as fast as I could find the setting -- I want to be able to open links and then switch right back to Twitter, letting the link load in the browser while I read a few more tweets. Hangouts appears not to have introduced any setting to disable this behavior. I've noticed a couple other apps do "this sort of thing" as well, though specific instances slip my mind now; a general solution would be great.

I've checked, and this (new?) behavior in Hangouts is identical on my (Cyanogenmod) phone and my (Samsung) tablet.
This started happening to me too recently. All links in Hangouts messages, when clicked, open in what appears to be a Hangouts-integrated browser. There is NO option to change this behavior.

It is definitely just an embedded instance of the Chrome browser - if you disable the Chrome app entirely, tapping a link in Hangouts gives you the normal "open with" dialog, and you can choose a default (I like the Adblock browser). But with the Chrome browser disabled you can't browse Google Play or update apps. And if you simply re-enable Chrome, it goes right back to opening links in Chrome and silently wipes out the choice of default that you just made.