I'm sorry about bumping issue, but I'd like to give my two cents and see if you'd like to reconsider this issue.
First, the argument of popularity.
+ All major web browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Edge, Internet Explorer, Opera, Midori and others) use ctrl-tab to switch tab. Neither <textarea> nor <input> consumes tab in any of these browsers, it's just used to change focus.
Epiphany (Web) used to use ctrl-tab to switch tabs, but I that changed.
+ Visual studio, visual studio code, intellij, code:blocks, atom, sublime text, brackets (and practically all other editors except vim and emacs) use ctrl-tab to switch tab. Tab is consumed.
Switching focus in these is usually harder. You can sometimes switch focus to the menu bar by pressing Alt (single press, key-down-key-up, no focus change if you press alt-tab). Switching focus to something else then the menu bar is harder (you need to know the specific keybinds), but the menu bar will at least display all the keyboard shortcuts.
+ The wikipedia "list of table shortcuts" lists "ctrl-tab" as "switch tab"
+ On a more personal note, I'm a representative in a student union in my university, and confusion over ctrl-tab not switching tab is something I've seen more then once.
All right, so, people are used to ctrl-tab switching tabs.
* The argument of obviousness ("don't make me think", or "great design is invisible")
Ctrl-tab is such an ubiquitous binding by now, that users just sort of expect it. I saw a design talk by some designer on google the other day, and she talked about how they'd just plop a UI in front of people and see what they'd do - and then make the UI such that those interactions made sense. Like A/B testing a'la extreme. You want an interface which is obvious, which makes sense, is intuitive, doesn't get in your way. Those are the successful interfaces. ctrl-tab is obvious.
Be successful - be ctrl-tab.
* Just rebind switch tab to ctrl-tab.
That's not possible for some reason? I'm not sure I get this. We need ctrl-tab to switch control groups, but what if I don't want to switch control groups, or if I just use my mouse do do that? What if I want to switch control groups with ctrl-alt-shift-caps-p?
* What about the people that *need* to be able to switch focus, maybe because an impairment (or that guy not having a mouse)?
This group contains many orders of magnitude fewer people then that other group. This does not mean that we should screw them over, but do we really need to assign *ctrl-tab* to that group specifically? They are not used to be able to do ctrl-tab in any other scenario. We could have ctrl-that wierd button next to 1, or win-tab, or ctrl-g, or F7. Any user who wants out of something presses esc; esc could "defocus" a field, and the user could tab happily ever after.
And also, even if ctrl-tab was de-facto standard for focus switching, I feel like I should be able to rebind it on my personal computer.
* OK. So what about the users who just don't like "ctrl-tab"?
Why don't they just rebind ctrl-tab to ctrl-page-up?
* Why don't you just use ctrl-page-up? It's not hard to get used to.
My keyboard doesn't have a page-up-button. There are many keyboards out there that lack such a key, you need to press ctrl-fn-some other button which isn't always easy to reach.
And also, it's so strange, right, it's not like ctrl-right and ctrl-left, or ctrl-home and ctrl-end. It's page up and page down. Maybe tabs can be seen sort of as pages, but they aren't spaced out vertically.
All in all, I'm not sure I understand this decision. None of the arguments I've seen seem to really hold too much ground.
Now that I've been "that guy", I should go spend time doing something more productive. Thanks for your consideration.
