1.
For power users who need their address bar to show the “http://” in a web address, you can revert to the original, preferred behavior:
- Open a new window and type about:config into the address/URL bar
- Paste in this quick filter-field search: browser.urlbar.trimURLs
- Double click on the browser.urlbar.trimURLs field to change its value from true to false
- Close the window (or tab) and your URL protocols will be unhidden
Why would you want to do this? If you copy/paste web address routinely — say, to clients, via email — you don’t want to be manually adding back the protocol to every email you send or document you create, so that the URL can be clickable.
2.
Firefox 6 introduced a new “domain highlighting” feature, where the address bar grays-out any protocol (like http:// or https:// ) and the directory path in the URL, leaving just the domain in black. The thinking was that it would help inexperienced users easily catch phishing websites.
It is annoying to me, though. It makes the true path harder to see, and since I work with URLs on a regular basis — copy/pasting them to clients in emails and documents — I wanted to turn it off. Here’s how:
- Open a new window or tab, and type about:config into the location bar
- Search for browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled in the filter field; you can copy/paste it from here
- Double click on the browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled field to toggle the value to false
- Close the window (or tab) and your domain paths will be unhidden
That’s all there is to it! Now you can revert to a better way. :-)
