I'm well aware. I'm saying that the tab should appear to close but persist in the background for a short period of time so that I can Ctrl-Shift-T and get my untouched context back.
What if you're watching a video on youtube? Even if you mute it, the video will continue to play, and if you resume the video later, your saved time will be 5 seconds later than what you thought it was.
Good point. It's times like these I wish there was proper separation between the "hyperlinked documents and dumb form-based UIs" web and the "jerry rigged universal app runtime" web.
EDIT: But if it were an option or an extension, I would gladly enable it to help for 99% of sites I use and either accept the occasional weirdness or blacklist it for Youtube et all
Even if everything is cached, there is an annoying delay while the tab is reconstructed and the server is pinged. Even for something as trivial as a directly viewing a single image.
That's my main pain point (I really do think about frequently), but if others are having problems with AJAX-generated forms or whatever, it would help them too.
Another example would be losing your place in on an infinitely scrolling page (yet another web anti-pattern) because you accidentally closed the tab. I would appreciate having a second to correct my mistake before I having to do the"scroll wildly for 30 seconds until it catches up to where I was" song and dance.