Mozilla recently made a few changes to the Firefox web browser that I personally do not like that much. One of the things that the developers changed recently is the way website urls are displayed in the address bar. HTTP websites no longer show up with the protocol http:// in front. Another change is that the core domain name is the only part of the domain that is highlighted in the address bar. The subdomain, e.g. www. or directories are shown in a lighter gray tone.
Other protocols are showing up by default. If you visit https sites for instance you see the https protocol in the address bar. This makes sense as it acts as it helps the user identify that the connection is to a secure site.
Lets take a look at the way urls are displayed in the Firefox address bar.
As you can see, there is no http protocol in front, and the www part of the address is shown in lighter colors.
To modify this display, enter about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit the enter key afterwards. First time users need to click the “I’ll be careful, I promise! link” on the warning page before they can modify the settings.
Filter for the term browser.urlbar.trimURLs and double-click it in the results listing. This sets it from True to False. The changes should be visible right away. Setting the parameter to False disables url trimming in Firefox so that the http protocol is shown on all tabs again.
To get rid of the light gray coloring, you need to enter browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled into the filter bar. Double-click the parameter again to set it to false. This removes the url formatting so that the url is displayed in one color.
The change is visible right away. The url formatting should look like this one from now on.
You can reverse the effect by completing the same steps again.
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This was annoying me also. Thanks for the quick fix.
It’s not need, so they removed it. Like you said when you are on a secure site you see HTTPS, so you know if you don’t see HTTPS, then it’s only HTTP. Why would you need it displayed?
Do i understand it correctly that the Firefox add-on HTTPS Everywhere does the same ?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No, this extension forces sites to use the https protocol instead of the http protocol. This is just a visual change.
I was looking around for the change until I suddenly realized I had Locationbar² installed. I had it configured to not hide any protocols, and that overrode the default formatting in Firefox.
Thanks once again for solving my problems for me before I’ve even noticed I have them! ;D
Same here! Didn’t notice it…
Actually I might give it a try as it is but it makes me feel safe to know I can change the behaviour anytime.
You are welcome ;)
Thanks a lot for this fix!
Why did Mozilla even do this? Was it a copy-cat thing since Chrome and Opera did it?
And why was I opted-in to this option? I hate when software developers think I shouldn’t be asked if I want to stop using features/options that have been standard FOR YEARS!
HTTPS and FTP are still shown yes, and that makes it all the more reason to keep showing HTTP since it keeps consistency. All the sudden I’m am surfing some strange HTTP-less protocol….”Oh my goodness what happened my INTERNET?!!”
And how about having a checkbox in the Options for crying out loud? I DON’T WANT TO GO INTO about:config!!!
/stupid rant
Thank you… this was butting me too. You never know what causes stuff like this with all the malware out there.
Thanks for this tip!
I appreciate all your tips, reviews and articles!
Thank you!!!
Sweet!
I agree, put the http back as a default in the next release mozilla + add the status bar back.
Peter
Thanks.
First of all I did not get a warning page to click on anything. I was able to get the http to appear, but was unable to get rid of the gray formatting in the url bar.
REALLY like this tip: many thanks !
Martin: Thanks for the tip!
You are welcome.
For those asking why you would ever need this?
Simple. For sharing URL’s, if I simply drag and drop the urls without http on it, they do not auto link and appear as just plain text, it’s a pain to have to append the http:// on it just to get it to hyper link.
This change was stupid IMO and they need to leave it alone.
Thank you Thank you Thank you… I aggregate 100 news articles a week into a paid subscription newsletter. The drag and drop did not pick up the http:// unless a remembered to drag the icon… Without it my links from the database fail and I was looking at many hours to hard code a check stop. I owe you a beer!
Thank you for this tip- the dropped ‘http’ drove me crazy when copying URLs and this fixed it. Thanks again for this!
Thanks for this – works a treat!
But there is one more thing that’s still annoying me. The auto-complete search results from previous URL history also seems to ignore the whole url.
e.g. if I have these in my history of previously-visited URLs history:
abc.com
www.abc.com
If then start typing the URL “www.abc.” the autocomplete dropdown menu will include both of those above possible matches. Whereas the previous behaviour would have been only to match www.abc.com because I didn’t start off by typing “abc.”
This is important for me when doing website testing because our internal test website is like abc.com but our live site is like www.abc.com and I often manually type URLs to test certain pages and I don’t want possible links to both sites being offered at the same time.
So it seems the part of the URL that the new FF functionality deemed unimportant enough to color gray are omitted from the search filtering. I tried looking through the other browser.urlbar options but can’t see an obvious setting to change the behaviour.
(Sorry to reply to myself…)
What I’m describing was changed for this reason:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=461483
Someone towards the end of that comment list complained for a similar reason to me, but the discussion was seemingly stopped before conclusion.
I don’t know if it was taken any further?
(Sorry to reply to myself AGAIN…)
Manage to track down that my issue is an open bug in Firefox:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=585971
Thanks a ton Martin! The missing “http” really bothered me.
Thank you – this has solved a very irritating quirk simply and easily.
Very good ! This was bugging me to no end. As part of my job, I cut and paste a lot of URLs, that little adjustment Firefox did was slowing me way down having to type in http:// each and every time into other forms.
but what is the use of the http:// even if site open fines without it,,
The main problem that has already been mentioned here is that if you copy and paste a URL from your address bar, it will NOT be a clickable link in just about every IM client, Word processor, email, or anything else.
Additionally, it is extremely inconsistent to have “ftp://” and “https://” but not have “http://”.
This Firefox change has been realy hacking me off , thanks for the information, I am now back to where I want to be. This worked a treat.
I really don’t see the big deal. If you don’t see HTTPS: then you know it’s HTTP:. And for those who say links don’t copy as links you’re wrong. It’s something with your settings if it doesn’t work. It works fine for me. I use it all the time. I just did it with this site. It shows “www.ghacks.net/2011/09/28/firefox-add-http-back-to-address-bar/” in my browser, BUT when I right click, and copy then paste, I get this “http://www.ghacks.net/2011/09/28/firefox-add-http-back-to-address-bar/”. Clearly the “http:” copies.
Have you tried dragging and dropping Bobby? If not, try it.
Ah yes I see now. Hm I never did that before. I always just copied it. Touche’
i found the removal of the http prefix particularly annoying when dragging & dropping urls between apps. Thanks for the fix!
Thank you very much.
I would be better if they asked before changing the looks of the browser…
Thanks, the http not displaying bugged me as well. It was certainly an annoying change since I went out of my way to discover a solution to change it back.
Thanks for providing instructions. Talk about a dumb couple of features.