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Currently konqueror uses a configuration dialog to set what elements you want in tabs (such as the close button). This is similar to how firefox does it. However, I personally think it would be more natural for the contents of tabs to be treated as toolbars. The idea would be that, within the konqueror toolbar configuration, would be a "tab" toolbar. There would be a collections of toolbar elements you could add to that toolbar, and you can add, remove, and position them however you want. Each tab in you tab bar would then have the layout set in that toolbar.

So for instance, my tabs currently have three elements: a favicon (the icon for that specific web page), the page title, and a close button. So the toolbar would look like:

favicon
title
close tab

However, if you wanted the close button to be next to the favicon, you just move it up by one. If you don't want the tab title, you prefer to identify tabs by favicon, you can remove that. Conversely, If you don't want the favicon you can remove it. Other buttons you might want to add include a "duplicate tab" button or a "detach tab button", even a "page preview" elements that turns the tabs into a list of thumbnail page previews. You could also have, say, a "shrinking title", which is what I have (the title shrinks if there are too many tabs), a "fixed width title", which has a title of fixed size no matter how many tabs you have and how big the tab title is, and a "flexible width title", which makes the tab wide enough to accommodate the whole title. It would give the user a great deal of flexibility in customizing the tab bar without requiring large and complicated configuration dialog.

I am not entirely sure this is possible to do in KDE, but if it is I think it would be much more powerful than the current system. It also would keep things more consistent.