Firefox users: What do you need the Firefox address bar for? Many will probably answer that they do not need it at all while some say that they use it to check out links by hovering the mouse over them on the website. Then there is also the group of users with other add-ons that have placed their icons in the status bar to fill it with life.
Displaying the url of a website that the user is hovering the mouse over on the page. That’s something that can be achieved in another way; That must have been the reason for Josiah Decker to create the Firefox add-on Status Address Bar. The add-on displays the urls of links that the user hovers over in the Firefox address bar as well.
Why would someone want this? The answer is screen estate. Moving the functionality to the address bar makes the status bar in Firefox redundant if it is only displayed for that purpose. The status bar can then be set to hidden so that it does not appear on the computer screen anymore.
It is at first confusing to see the link urls appear in the Firefox address bar especially since it removes the url of the website the user is on for that time. There is another problem that was acknowledged by the developer of the add-on: Relative links are shown without part of the domain structure, e.g. /en-US/firefox/ instead of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/ which would appear in the Firefox status bar at the Mozilla website.
Status Address Bar might still be an interesting option for users who use the “hover over link” functionality in Firefox regularly but do not need the status bar otherwise and run Firefox on a small computer screen. It can be downloaded for all Firefox 2 and 3 versions at the Mozilla Firefox website.
Update: The add-on is no longer developed. Firefox 4 and future versions display the web address of a link above the status bar which means that it is possible to hide the status bar without losing the functionality to display the urls of websites in the browser.
Enjoyed the article?: Then sign-up for our free newsletter or RSS feed to kick off your day with the latest technology news and tips, or share the article with your friends and contacts on Facebook or Twitter.Related Articles:
Visualise Firefox loading progress in address barChange Firefox Font Size Of Address, Tab And Status Bar
Firefox 4 Changes: Do Not Track, Link Urls Moved Down
My Spambox, Create A Temporary Email Address In Firefox
Open Typed Urls In New Tabs In Firefox
nice.
i went a different way for the same effect, first i used url tooltip, but that didn’ t always play nice with certain websites (showing picture on mouseover would be useless due to the tooltip being on front), so i went with autohiding the statusbar when not in use, but showing whenever it’ s loading a page or when placing the mouse over a link. this is especially nice if you use extended statusbar for more loading info.
url tooltip:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/12015
autohide statusbar:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1530
extended statusbar:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1433
Same thing can be done with fission plus more features….
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1951
I hate the ideea of an adress bar and I think it incomodates people. In my case it surely does!
Hmm. I have a whole lot of stuff in my FF status bar. But the left side is reserved for showing URL’s when I hover over them. I’ve always seemed to have this functionality, so didn’t know that an add-in was needed?
Jojo it might be useful for users who want to hide the statusbar in Firefox.
WHY would someone want to do that? The status bar on my screen takes up 0.25″ of space There are 16 icons/pieces of information displayed. That is a lot of value for the space it consumes!
Why would not they if they do not use it at all or only to check urls that they hover their mouse over?
Is there an addon for keeping bookmark toolbar while in full screen mode? i.e. I want to see address bar with buttons, bookmark toolbar, and tabs bar.