Actually I still argue that tabs are a Bad Thing. Developers have taken a thing that SHOULD be handled by the window manager, and written their own way of doing it -- every application slightly differently, naturally.

It's not as big a deal on Windows where the look+feel of various applications was always inconsistent as hell -- remember when Trillian was the most popular IM client, it seemed like in those days virtually every application handled windowing differently, it was terrible.

But it's a bigger issue on OS X and in Linux. Since both have functionality to cycle through windows of a given application, tabs become less important. Of course, we still end up with visual clutter, so even luddites like myself use tabs now and again. But this should really be implemented as an OS feature, not on a per-application basis.

Google, of course, vehemently disagrees, since they implement their own terrible look-and-feel everywhere. (see: crappy windowing inside of GMail, crappy windowing behavior of Hangouts, etc).

If you really want the window manager to handle your browser windows then just open new windows instead of opening tabs. All of your window manager's fancy window switching features, etc. will work.

I think the problem isn't that tabbed browsing exists, but that window managers are not good enough to handle user experience as well as tabbed browsing does.

And the fact that tabs exist isn't stopping window managers from getting better at it. They just haven't.

It seems that putting the application in control of its window-switching experience has just worked out better.

Apple has started to embrace tabs within the system, most notably by integrating them into Finder windows in Mavericks. I agree that they should make it a standard type of application and have a standard tab UI that is used in as many apps as possible.