switchTab() cannot make the tab as currentTab in WebdriverIO standalone mode - selenium-chromedriver

Question

webdriverio with selenium-standalone server, without wdio.
Clicking a link to open a new tab.
I can see the new tab opened, but no elements on the new tab can be located, as if the new tab never existed.
The titles of the first tab and the new tab:
C:\Users\...\test>node switchtab.js
main window: CDwindow-(D77C1A0428E3E5717A1DF2473274B905)
Title is: WebdriverIO - WebDriver bindings for Node.js
new window: CDwindow-(D77C1A0428E3E5717A1DF2473274B905)
Title is: WebdriverIO - WebDriver bindings for Node.js
switchTab: CDwindow-(BE8C6F13723E588E3E39C7C21C02C290)
current window: CDwindow-(D77C1A0428E3E5717A1DF2473274B905)
Title is: WebdriverIO - WebDriver bindings for Node.js
It always gets the first tab id as you can see. Therefore no elements on new tab can be located.
What did I do wrong? How can I make the new tab as current tab? Even though I see the new tab becomes the active tab, but apprently the code doesn't think so.
Here is the sample code snippet:
var webdriverio = require('webdriverio');
var options = { desiredCapabilities: { browserName: 'chrome' } };
var client = webdriverio.remote(options);
var mainW, newW, newW1;
client
.init()
.url('http://webdriver.io/')
.getCurrentTabId().then(function (handle) {
mainW = handle;
console.log('main window: ' + mainW);
})
.getTitle().then(function(title) {
console.log('Title is: ' + title);
})
.waitForExist('a[href="http://try.learnwebdriverio.com"]')
.click('a[href="http://try.learnwebdriverio.com"]')
.pause(5000)
.getCurrentTabId().then(function (handle) {
newW = handle;
console.log('new window: ' + newW);
})
.getTitle().then(function(title) {
console.log('Title is: ' + title);
})
.getTabIds().then(function (handle) {
console.log('switchTab: ' + handle[1]);
newW1 = handle[1];
})
.switchTab(newW1)
.pause(5000)
.getCurrentTabId().then(function (handle) {
console.log('current window: ' + handle);
})
.getTitle().then(function(title) {
console.log('Title is: ' + title);
.end();
switchTab() won't help. After .switchTab(newW1), it still gets the first tab. And even worse, I see it physically switches to the first tab.

Answer 1

It works by using Testrunner (with mocha, and I think other frameworks would be just the same). The only difference between standalone mode and Testrunner mode I see is that:
Different than using the standalone mode all commands that get executed by the wdio test runner are synchronous.
Therefore, It should have something to do with synchronization, which the standalone mode doesn't handle correctly.
Please note that in Testrunner mode, the new tab is also not current after clicking the link. You have to manually switchTab() to set the new tab as current.