Comment 6 for bug 863399

On the subject of whether the current-workspace-only application switcher should work in a similar fashion to the new Unity switcher, I would say there is good reason not to.

The new Unity switcher shows icons for each application, and if using Alt-` it will show a preview of the window. This is useful for locating a particular window when there are many and the user doesn't know/care where they are. It is not possible for the switcher to highlight the window itself because it may be on a different workspace.

However when dealing with windows only on the current workspace this approach would be suboptimal.
When a user has positioned windows on a workspace they are aware of where they are spatially, and so highlighting the window itself, as the traditional application switcher does, is more intuitive.