In bug 574688, the status bar is being removed for Firefox 4. All the current features in the status bar have other homes, except for the status text itself. Eg, in the left side: Connecting..., Waiting..., Transferring..., Done.

Since there are only 4 (correct me if I'm wrong) states it can indicate - maybe it would be better to create a small icon-indicator for that and put it to the addon bar with ability to drag it anywhere else. Or maybe even lock it to the left bottom corner of the window, anyways the 16x16 pixels won't take up much space.

This progress will be visually represented with different states with the progress bar placed in the location bar, instead of in text (bug 578028). We might not get that initially, but the overall goal is to show a difference between "trying to find the server" and "trying and being successful"

Based on Alex's comment, I think this is WONTFIX? The argument I'm hearing is that most users will get what they need from the progress visualizations, and those who want text will presumably turn the status bar back on, but that the text is not viewed to have importance in and of itself. Alex/Dietrich, please feel free to push back if I'm misunderstanding.

(In reply to comment #3) > Based on Alex's comment, I think this is WONTFIX? The argument I'm hearing is > that most users will get what they need from the progress visualizations, and > those who want text will presumably turn the status bar back on, but that the > text is not viewed to have importance in and of itself. > > Alex/Dietrich, please feel free to push back if I'm misunderstanding. Last I heard there would be no option to turn the status bar back on.

I'm not the canonical source of this, but I am also of the understanding that the status bar is going away completely. The Connecting/Waiting/Transferring/Done states should be handled by the progress bar, and are eliminated since it's duplicate functionality.

In that case this bug needs to be re-opened and block, and bug 578028 needs to block as well. The dependency chain here is pretty horrendous, and it's a little surprising that this is coming up so close to our originally intended string freeze date. Where's the design work for this being held? If someone were to want to implement this, where would they look?

Yeah, let's get canonical up in this business. We have very different engineering outcomes if the plan is to kill the status bar entirely, versus turning it off by default but leaving it there for those who like their statii.

What's the reasoning for not allowing the status bar to be turned back on? Seems like the new "add-on bar" would have lots of unused space in most cases.

Adding Boriss, since she might know what the decision here was (and why) — I probably shouldn't speculate in what the final outcome of their discussions were. :)

(In reply to comment #7) > Yeah, let's get canonical up in this business. We have very different > engineering outcomes if the plan is to kill the status bar entirely, versus > turning it off by default but leaving it there for those who like their statii. This is the intended outcome: status bar is off by default, but with an option to enable it for those that prefer it. The status bar, along with its status messages, are considered advanced behavior in Firefox 4.0 and thus should be off by default. As Johnath correctly notes in comment 3, most users will find all the information on page state they would find useful from progress visualizations on the tabs themselves. This is a far happier experience: not only is it fast visual recognition over not-so-fast reading and processing, but before a page is loaded status messages flickr too quickly to even be read in the status bar. There's really no need to remove the status text from the status bar, and there's certainly no need to move it somewhere else.

Back to WONTFIX it is!

>This is the intended outcome: status bar is off by default, but with an option >to enable it for those that prefer it. My impression from Myk and Dietrich (although I could definitely be confused), is that the extension bar will not contain any of the existing status bar functionality. I've started a thread with everyone cc'd so we can all get on the same page. (Either way this bug is wontfix, since the status text can be expressed visually with different states of a progress bar).

(In reply to comment #12) > (Either way this bug is wontfix, since the status text can be expressed > visually with different states of a progress bar). The color flash patterns of the status line will have to be dumbed down (encode less info than the status text), otherwise they will be undecipherable, therefore it's not an adequate replacement for this advanced feature. Why such contempt for the more technical users who have relied on this from the beginning of Fx? This is so easy to avoid, just make the status bar optional, or make the status text field into a widget that can be placed wherever (add-on bar)

The best method would be having the status bar available as a downloadable third party add-on.

FYI, gentlemen, there are recurrent reports of DNS delays, for example http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=1435445 . There is also a Ubuntu bug report ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/firefox/+bug/621879 ) that DNS failure can affect Firefox preferentially. So just to be clear, we will need a status report of some sort to support users on this.

(In reply to comment #14) > The best method would be having the status bar available as a downloadable > third party add-on. https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/55724/ - Link Target Display https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/235283/ - Status-4-Evar

> https://addons.mozilla.org/ru/firefox/addon/235283/ - Status-4-Evar Bingo.