While we did post this back in July when this feature had landed on the nightly builds for Firefox 7, we felt it was worth posting again. We’ve also included the tweak to turn off the Domain Highlighting feature which was introduced in Firefox 6 as well. For those of you still on Firefox 5 or older or simply have not noticed the changes in how addresses are displayed in the address bar in Firefox 6 and 7, allow me to show you:
Firefox 7 default behavior. http;// has been removed and only the domain name is in black (hence the term domain highlighting).
Firefox 5 and older behavior. The entire address is shown in black and http:// is also displayed.
You can use both tweaks below or either one.
- To always display http:// in the address bar:
- In a new tab, type about:config in the address bar and press enter
- If needed, click the I’ll be careful, I promise button
- Filter for browser.urlbar.trimURLs
- Double-click the entry to change to value to false
- Close the tab
- To remove domain highlighting:
- In a new tab, type about:config in the address bar and press enter
- If needed…Click the I’ll be careful, I promised button.
- Filter for browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled
- Double-click to change the value to False
- Close the tab. Changes take effect immediately.
As mentioned earlier, secure sites such as Mozilla’s Bugzilla or addons.mozilla.org still do and always will display the https:// in the address bar in Firefox 7 and newer.
»To always display http:// in the address bar« — I hope you meant: »To always display the transfer protocol in the address bar.«
»http://« should only be displayed when the current page has been transferred via HTTP. Other protocols should be reflected in the URL as well: »ftp:«, »https:«, »file:« etc.
Don’t mean to play the pedant, but every part of an URI exists for a reason and reflects information.