I have discovered a very nice Firefox extension named Fission over at the Firefox Mastery website which deals with all things Firefox. Fission is a Firefox add-on that displays the loading progress of a website in the address bar of Firefox. It uses transparent colors to visualize the loading progress and I have to admit that I really love the way it looks and displays it.
Some options can be changed to make the extension even more appealing and make it fit the Firefox theme better. Unfortunately though is that the number of colors that can be chosen is limited. Users can’t choose from the full color spectrum but only from predefined colors.
Instead of displaying a color they can also choose to display an image or move the progress bar and connection status to the right of the address bar.


Firefox: Show Mouse Over Urls In The Firefox Address Bar
Firefox Tab Progress Bar
Opera’s progress bar in detail
Remove Colors And Backgrounds With No Color For Firefox
I’ve been using Fission for a while, it enabled me to save the space taken by my status bar. Great extension. By the way, the colour can be changed, in about:config, under extensions.fission.color.
Not sure of the value of this eye candy.
Something more useful is Fasterfox which has a page load timer that displays in the status bar. I find this to be very useful.
http://fasterfox.mozdev.org/
Nice.
Now imagine Opera having this option in a default version w/o plugins :-O
OPERA FTW !!! ;)
Imagine Opera not having plugins at all. Oh, right.