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.