The Guru received this inquiry from Mark via Contact Us:

I remember reading your entry back a couple months ago about new tab ordering in 3.1: http://ffextensionguru.wordpress.com/2009/01/12/new-tab-behavior-coming-in-fx-31/

Beta 3 has come out and the behavior is not present. I was rather excited about this development. Do you know if this new behavior is no longer on the 3.1/3.5 radar any longer?

I had to look back at the original article from Mozilla Links. According to the article, the new behaviour would be “will be featured in future releases.” Also, “the new behavior will be added to trunk builds soon, but its inclusion in Firefox 3.1 is yet to be decided.” I’ve been using the trunk builds throughout the Firefox 3.1/3.5 cycle and don’t recall seeing it included. I have a feeling that Private Browsing and getting TraceMonkey functional and stable took higher priority over this tab behaviour. Doubtful this is going to make the Beta 4 released based on reading about this in BugZilla (Bug 465673).