Personally, I like being able to Cmd+tab to commonly-used chat apps. Really hard to have a conversation (while doing other stuff) when you have to Cmd+tab to Chrome, and then find the tab.
The window manager is not semantically aware that a particular tab in a particular window in a particular browser is the canonical navigation target for switching to a particular app.
Vimium helped me with this - the `T` shortcut opens an omnibar that searches your open tabs for the text you're entering. It's still two-part, but it's keyboard shortcut + text search instead of visually identifying the correct tab and clicking on it.
In general is there a good browser extension or something for a "browser chat tab" that you keep open and don't want to manage as a normal browser tab/window? With a pulse-on-change feature?
I can see some value to a chat app, not least to hold your presence to online. It's the app for the rest of it and the Instagram app that have me confused