From a design point of view, I hope that you can see why always keeping a dashboard of apps open, and spawning new tabs for each app, can make sense. Otherwise you'll need to be clicking to go back to that dashboard all the time, instead of clicking to remove those old tabs.

It's a bit brute force, but you can replicate all those dashboard app links as browser bookmarks, which means you can control the tab spawning behaviour better.

I don't think there's an Okta config option to change the browser tab behaviour but some other customers have asked for this. If you (or whoever your Okta admin is) goes to the Product > Ideas menu option above and look for an idea named "Open application URLs in same tab" you can add your vote for this as a feature.

From a design point of view, I can see how always keeping an Okta dashboard tab open would be useful to the typical user. But it can also be cumbersome for "power user" types who set up their workflow in a very specific way. I have Okta set to my new tab page and I'm opening and closing tabs with keyboard shortcuts constantly, so it would be ideal to be able to open a new tab next to the current one and within a second have my chosen app loading in that same tab. Having to manually navigate back to the Okta tab, click on an app, and then manually move that app's tab where I want it to go in my tab bar is a very tedious process when doing it dozens of times an hour.

I don't seem to be able to submit that feedback (I'm getting a "widget not loaded" popup then a blank page), so if you would be able to do it on my behalf it would be appreciated.

Your bookmarking method is a good workaround though. Thanks for the tip. Cheers.