Do you know about the alt+` shortcut to switch between windows of an app? It's really nice.
See, "apps" made sense in the prehistoric times when single-threaded desktops with limited RAM were primarily used to do one thing at a time. But things changed. The concept of an "app" have not been making sense for a long time: you can run Gmail and Facebook in two browser windows (which together live in the same process) or you can have a single window (Chrome) launching one process per tab, or you can have a terminal with several processes running in different windows, or you can have a copy of Microsoft Word embedded inside of an Excel spreadsheet. Similarly you can have an iframe with embedded Google Maps inside of your Wordpress blog. So what's an "app" then?
Microsoft correctly recognized in early 90s that the concept of a "program" or an "app" was obsolete, and modern UI should be using "window", "document" or "folder". An app is just an implementation detail: you can have 3 apps involved in rendering a single document or drawing the same window. Early smartphones couldn't handle these tricks (like multi-tasking) well, so this temporarily reincarnated idea of the "app" came back from the grave, to be happily copied by Unity just because "iOS has them".
Boo.
I think in terms of apps. "I need to switch back to my browser". "Alt-tab". "I need to change windows in this app", "Alt-`". I guess owning a Mac got me prepared for it, but I love this new behavior in Gnome3.
There's no one right way, and governing by pure democracy simply won't work, because everyone has a different opinion.
And sure, you can make it configurable, but that's not the point - is it? If you're a power user, you'll find a way to manipulate the system to your will no matter what. But 99.9% of the users (well, when dealing with Linux admittedly that percentage is much smaller) will NEVER CHANGE THE DEFAULT.
So: apps vs windows? Side launcher vs bottom launcher? Doesn't matter. Just choose one, and for the love of all things holy, be consistent.
> You say this, as every major platform migrates towards apps.
It goes in circles because computer technologies are bursty. With Win95, managing by window was reasonable because having >10 windows would usually crash the box. That's also why every window was a taskbar entry, as there was actually room for all of them... By WinXP, when virtual memory became more robust and RAM cheaper, you needed to sometimes collapse taskbar buttons by app to make them fit... And now in Win7, it's the default with just big icons. People leave way too many windows open now because closing them is a chore, and people are crappy/lazy memory budgeters. Apple realized this with iOS, and ported some relevant concepts back to Lion--apps should be able to close and restore at any time, and their open-ness is irrelevant to the user. So yeah, that's why we're back to thinking about apps; windows may be what you most often interact with, but they are no longer the mental unit of desktop management. It's now all about task-->app-->windows.
As an aside, let's consider how effed up MDI is, the inconsistencies in window/toolbar management between Win Office apps, and how the Mac "one window per document, palettes appear on app activation" scheme has managed to stay remarkably consistent for over a decade.
Stick them on different virtual-desktops and they will not show up in the Alt-tab.
I find virtual-desktops a great way to organize, that has been available for 20 (?) years
right click task bar > properties > taskbar buttons: never combine
...the point being that unity should try and learn more from the nice and clean but yet easily costumizable interface of Windows 7
Disclaimer: I'm mainly a Windows user, touching a Mac from time to time, and using Xfce when on *nix because it just works and doesn't stand in my way...