Last week a new feature landed on the Firefox 7 Nightly Builds. Bug 665580 removes the ‘http://’ from the address bar and just displays the remainder of the URL and also omitting the trialing /. So in Firefox 7 the blog address would appear in the address bar as blog.ffextensionguru.com (the bolding of the domain name is part of the new Domain Highlighting in Firefox 6).

This has seen some interesting discussions in both Firefox Builds and on Bugzilla. It appears Chrome and Opera (but not IE9) are already doing this and of course Firefox has to follow suit now. For those who would rather still have the entire URL displayed in the address bar, a simple about:tweak will take care of this.

1. In a new tab past & go about:config
2. If needed, click the I’ll be careful, I promise button
3. Filter for browser.urlbar.trimURLs
4. Double-click the entry to change to value to false
5. Close the tab

I should point out that secure sites such as Mozilla’s Bugzilla, will still display the https:// in the address bar, but will also still omit the trailing / at the end of the address.