Personally I love the feature, but I really feel like window managers/desktop environments should be handling window tabs. Imagine your desktop handling all tabs across all programs the same exact way instead of being reimplemented differently for each program. You could window switch to Firefox with alt-tab, add a ctrl- to your key combo and cycle through tabs in that window. Or imagine typing the title of a tab in your desktop's searchbar and being taken directly to it.
At the very least it'd make managing 100+ open tabs more feasible.
Google Chrome had this on Android several years ago, but it was quickly yanked out—probably because people hated it as it felt like ti bogged down the OS with it. Personally, it felt like information overload forced into a limited UX context.
But now with advancements like tab unloading/discarding and faster CPUs, it might work for some people om mobile devices. Desktop browsers though might still be hampered by limited task/context-switching options.
I totally understand the confusion it brought to users, but I'm equally disappointed in how quickly the idea was abandoned, especially by the broader Android app ecosystem. It would be so useful to be able to open multiple Amazon app tabs to compare products for example.
The feature is still in the OS, so apps that declare support can allow users to open multiple simultaneous windows of itself. Most native Android apps can probably add support for this feature with minimal code changes, as Android "best practices" have pushed apps towards good reactivity support and rigorous handling of app state in these types of edge cases.
Windows 7 and IE introduced similar level of desktop integration with tab previews and tab navigation integrated into the taskbar.
On Mac, it seems that all the major applications are using the standard keyboard shortcuts for tab navigation and I don’t think that’s very different in practice to what you describe. I assume Windows is the same?
At the very least it'd make managing 100+ open tabs more feasible.