I'd prefer newTab(url, true) so that all external links will be loaded to new tab. Now external links will be loaded to the active tab. It might be confusing to the user that the previous page is not visible anymore in the tabs page.

Good side of this is that this decreases number of tabs created that also helps when introducing real tabs support.

There are pros and cons but as said I'd prefer newTab(url, true) over load(url)