Julie,
I appreciate you passing this along. It's not that they don't like tabbed browsing completely. It's just that it doesn't work like other browsers and isn't very efficient, out of the box. It would be much more efficient if there was a user setting that controlled whether things opened in a new tab or in the same window that is already open, and then a right-click context menu option to open the selected item in a new tab or even in a new window (much like Internet Explorer works and I assume other browsers as well).