Comment 4 for bug 504405

That justification doesn't make much sense. "Ctrl-tab doesn't work, so there's not a problem."

Allow me to rephrase. "Upstream GNOME uses a shortcut that no casual user will never deduce without reading the manual, and we're in no position to change their decision."

This is meant in only a little offense to GNOME, but the design decision was a poor one. They should find some way to reconcile their keyboard-focus mechanism with the fact that ctrl-tab is commonly used to switch documents.

How can I make such a blanket assumption? I'm willing to bet that Firefox and Pidgin combined are much more popular than GNOME, and every tab-document UI I can think of under Windows (Visual Studio, Notepad++, and now I'm drawing a blank) use Ctrl-Tab.

Any user of any operating system -except GNOME- would expect ctrl-tab to switch tab-based windows. If Ubuntu can't fix this, that's unfortunate - because the interface does suffer - but it's more understandable if you give the actual reason.

To really resolve this bug, you'd need a concerted cooperation with upstream GNOME and their human interface guidelines to actually come to a decision that benefits people who aren't GNOME designers, but general users. And that's not a paper-cut, that's a gash.