A switch for that like in the desktop-version is very useful. If you have a page eg. newspage with many links, you can open them with "open in new tab". Now you have to watch for that popup and tap on it in time. With " open new tab in foreground" you don't have to watch and react.
Thr advantage for opening a link in a new tab: if you rad that page, you can go back and the previous page is back without loading. The data-tranfer-rate is not always at 100Mbit ...