This! Everything in the OS should follow that workflow.

> every text entry can be made modal like vim.

That's such a wasted design opportunity - give the users freedom in using a proper text editing tool instead of whatever awfulness the OS designers got stuck in decade(s) ago

What are some examples? I finally got around to using a tiling window manager this week and have been loving it, but would love a browser without a status bar to go with it

The main one that comes to mind is https://surf.suckless.org/

But there are many other minimal UI browsers as well as Firefox that support no tabs.

I’ve been using qutebrowser which doesn’t have much of a UI since it is vim based

I like tab-less browsers. Leaving tab/window management to the OS means I don’t have to learn browser-specific commands on top of the OS's ones.

I'm using Firefox with a custom userChrome.css:

#TabsToolbar { visibility: collapse !important; }

Works quite ok but I cannot disable opening tabs completely in Firefox.

There is a Chrome extension that allows you to limit the number of tabs per window. Tab Limiter I think (on my phone atm).