Looking at the developments of UI elements since the status bar was abandoned in Firefox 4 beta 7, by now, close to release of Firefox 4, we see the following:
- Network status text is back in the bottom-left as an overlay, the same location as in the 3.x status bar.
- Hovered link URLs are back in the bottom-left as an overlay as well, the same location as the 3.x status bar.
- The window resize-gripper has found its way back to the bottom right of the browser window, either in the add-on bar or as a content overlay (which is, by the way, broken - see bug 367152)
This shows that UI elements are gravitating back towards their industry-standard locations instead of what was conceived to be "better" by a paid team of so-called "experts".
Even more so, (1) and (2) are now fixed and can't be switched-off or configured. In what way is that better?
So, was the status bar abandoned? initially, yes, then people got feedback they should have asked for
before freezing the code (done in the same beta that introduced this new UI; another huge mistake), as a result elements precipitating to locations again that would be better served with permanent, not temporary, user interface elements. So in the end it was half-abandoned, and replaced with haphazard elements that look unprofessional.
You can also ask yourself what the reason has been to try and force this feature, used actively by 85% of the users (as shown in
this survey), to be removed. It was already optional, so there was no pressing reason to get rid of it entirely - people who did not want it could turn it off (something that can't be done anymore at all now - the overlays are there whether you want them or not). Essential information for a number of people like the page load progress and file download status are completely missing in Firefox 4 as it stands now.
