How to create a Shopify app that opens an external webpage in a new tab?

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I am trying to create a Shopify app that can be used by the admins of stores that have the app installed. I am trying to open a web page on our external site on a new tab and pass some query parameters to it when you click on the app name pinned on the left navigation bar under Apps or clicking the app name from the apps dropdown. 

The issue I am currently facing that since the embedded apps are rendered inside an iframe, we cannot automatically open a new tab for displaying the external web page since the browser will block popups. I am able to load the external web page in the iframe but that is not the experience we are looking for.

I looked at a couple of Shopify apps that use this flow. The Gelato Shopify App uses this flow as we checked. Does anybody know how they do it? The Gelato app has an icon indicating that it is a link in the apps dropdown. Ours is an embedded app currently. What type of Shopify app do our app needs to be to appear and have the functionality of the Gelato App?