Firefox 7 is out now, bringing with it much-welcome memory usage reductions and speed improvements. It has one annoying UI change, though: URLs in the address bar no longer have the “http://” protocol prefix. While that may be okay for casual users, it will annoy a lot of power users.
To fix it, just follow these steps:
- Open a new tab and type about:config into the address bar.
- Search for browser.urlbar.trimURLs
- Double click on the browser.urlbar.trimURLs key to change its boolean value from true to false.
- Close the tab and enjoy your unhidden URL protocols.
This is the second time in two versions Mozilla has made an unhelpful UI tweak. In Firefox 6 they added “domain highlighting,” which greys-out the URL text, while leaving the domain in darker lettering. Fortunately, it was just as easy to fix.
