The knee-jerk reaction is almost certainly going to go along the lines of “But you can emulate all of those features with spaces anyways!”

Which is true. But what if my tools don’t all do that? What if doing so makes it harder to work for some reason or another? Users who use this tab emulation will experience all of the downsides that spaces are supposed to avoid, like misaligning justified comments. I think it’s a waste of effort.

All I can say is, I appreciate the Go team’s decision to use tabs. It makes semantic sense, it puts everyone on the same playing field, and it doesn’t require editor support. Even Windows 98 notepad can be used comfortably as a code editor for tabs-based code, if you for some reason wanted to do that. In reality that is not necessary or desired, but it illustrates that this is the path of least resistance.

That web browsers handle tabs poorly is of no concern to me. If it were really a huge problem, pretty much any editor in existence can do a Replace All to get back perfect spaces-indented code.