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 name 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.
As you can see, there is no http protocol in front, and the www part of the address is shown in lighter colors.
Disable URL Trimming in Firefox
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 on 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.
Note that this affects only the protocol that is used to connect to the website but not the formatting.
Disable URL Formatting in Firefox
To get rid of the light gray coloring of part of the domain name so that the full domain name is displayed in the same color, you need to enter browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled into the filter bar.
Double-click the parameter again to set it to false. This disables the url formatting so that the url is displayed in one color.
The change is visible right away. The url formatting should look like this one from now on (like it did in previous versions of Firefox were the feature was not used by default).
You can reverse the effect by completing the same steps again. Basically, set both parameters to true and you have reversed the effect.