Fatal's Journal

Here is a list of just some relevant forum topics where people ask for return of real detach of tabs -- as it was in pre Opera 9.5 or do it better. Opera "fixed" one potential (I didn't find any public complains about this on Opera forums, nor anywhere on Opera Community blogs) UI problem with simply removal of this feature completely.

Topic	Replies	Views
Detach command not working properly	102	7241
Detach windows	49	1992
Opera's lost features, which should really come back?	36	2649
Opera 9.20 "Detach" tab option removed?	31	1838
Dragging tabs out in 9.5	24	439
Detachable/Tearable Tabs in Opera 10 Alpha for Mac OS X?	11	416
Detached tab functionality killed with 9.5/9.6	23	419
Detachable Tabs	5	407
Detaching pages	4	278
I need _blank pages in tabs, but popup out of the main window	4	160
Tab: cut and paste	4	116
Draging a Tab and Droping to the Desktop performs differently	3	178
Tab Tearing in Opera 10?	3	141
Tab tearing to multiple monitors	3	125
q: Move out tab from Opera	3	154
Problems with Stickam & Chat Windows.	2	127
Getting small pop-up windows out of the frame	1	45
Managing multiple tabs		72
Misc Problems:		116
new opera:config setting: "allow tabs outside windows"	13	300

I believe ~20 topics, ~300 replies and ~15000 views should finally bring some attention of Opera developers.

With Safari 4 and Chrome have almost the same functionality working (tabs tearing) I think there will be more and more new treads asking the same for Opera. BTW, even Firefox now has smother tab tearing behaviour than modern Opera does (for example, it doesn't leave empty window after last tab was moved to other window).

Improving Tabbed Browsing article on Mozillazine blog.
My comment here is only one word image:

Here also some cite from response called "Usability of tabbed browsing in Firefox" on 456 Berea St:

The usability studies were done at Google, using a special build of Firefox 1.5b1 that was configured to open targeted links in new tabs instead of in new Windows. The testing revealed some things that caused problems for many users:

• Back button: When a new tab is created, it gets a blank session history, so you can’t use the back button to get back to the page that launched the tab.
• Closing tabs: Many did not see the close button, and instead used the contextual menu to close tabs. Some tried closing the entire browser window instead of just the tab.
• Stacking order of tabs: When closing a tab that was opened by a targeted link from another tab, the adjacent tab is made active instead of the tab containing the opening link.

The team experimented with some adjustments to the tabbed browsing in Firefox to find out if they would improve usability:

• Put close buttons on the tabs
• Change the closing order of tabs
• Implement an “Open links that would open new windows in tabs” preference