I think that could help identify recently used tabs faster.

What if the tab bar is in overflow mode and the tab that would be highlighted is scrolled offscreen? I tested scrolling that tab into view, but it felt odd to have two scrolling areas, i.e. the Ctrl+Tab panel and the tab bar. So I'm leaning towards to just highlighting the selected tab no matter if it's visible.

It would only be a little distracting if the tab preview panel scrolled in order but with the current MRU behavior, it would be very distracting in that it might jump around quite frequently. Good idea but not with tab overflow.

Agreed that it could be distracting. Maybe one of the tab bar scroll arrow could be highlighted to indicate that an invisible tab is selected in that direction.

I suggest eliminating the entire tab preview panel (at least for CTRL+Tab, ideally also for the tabs list). It is a distracting, confusing, and different visual representation of the actual tabs, which are a horizontal line that is (in) the tab-bar order (not an x-y coordinate system on some combined MRU & physical order). I disagree that scrolling to tabs that are in overflow to then highlight them would be confusing. Quite contrary: I think it would be far more useful than confusing. There needs to be a strong correlation between the confusing (and ill-conceived) tab panel and the actual tabs.

I don't think we'll do this, although this might be good extension fodder. If someone can demonstrate that this works well, we can reconsider this bug.