I think this is fine. I won't use it, but it's fine.
It's the same reason I didn't use IE9. It's not user friendly and make me have to look in two different places to confirm which tab is which URL. It's exhausting and takes up too much space.
At the end of the day, we're 330 posts deep, and there's a universal consensus across users in terms of what your users, the users of Orion, would like to see.
Now, as a designer, I live by the phrase "The User Is Always Wrong", but in this case, they're asking for an interaction that they have experienced, enjoyed, and are comfortable with, as opposed to some amorphic feature with vague verbiage.
Vlad, you've created a great product. I love it, I really do. And I applaud the team for attempting to reinvent the wheel here and take a risk on improving the experience.
I think there's just a point where either the community needs to concede that its not going to get what it is looking for here in terms of compact tabs.
I'm sure there's a path forward to make a better compact tabs experience than Apple did, but IE9s implementation still feels the same as it did back then.