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Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Firefox: Add HTTP Back To Address Bar

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.

firefox new 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.

browser urlbar trimurls

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.

browser urlbar formatting enabled

The change is visible right away. The url formatting should look like this one from now on.

firefox address bar

You can reverse the effect by completing the same steps again.


© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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