After some additional testing with this workaround I've discovered it has a caveat. If the user has "Block pop-up windows" enabled in Safari (which I believe is the default) then the directive link silently fails. If I disable "Block pop-up windows" it works as expected.
So if you do add this setting, it might be better to at least make it an optional setting as it seems to completely break downloading in Safari by default.
This is related to how you generate an anchor tag with a target and then click it using JS. I haven't tested it, but a possible workaround would be to not dynamically generate the anchor tag like that and instead apply those attr values to the ng-csv element itself. Then as long as ng-csv is used on an anchor tag this target=_blank might work correctly?
From the discussion on Pull Request #83