I'm finding the new behavior in Minefield nightly's awesome bar quite disturbing. As I move my mouse around the page, my peripheral vision is seeing these 'ghost' urls appearing in the awesome bar and making me think things on the page are actually happening. We are generally trained to see notifications at the top of the browser window (chat messages appearing on tabs, for instance). I think this new behavior is distracting, though I understand the thinking that went into it (want to show that your url will change if you click). The established convention in all browsers is the status bar. People are used to this. The status bar is near useless now in Minefield.

FWIW, the status bar is going away. See http://jboriss.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/removing-firefoxs-status-bar-and-rehousing-add-on-icons-part-1-of-2/ and sequels.

This bug is mostly about the distracting location bar, but if you want to talk about the status bar, I think you need to follow what Chrome does and display the status bar only when a link is hovered. The way it stands now, I have UI elements toggling in and out of visibility as I move my mouse: the current URL, the RSS/star icons, etc.

Furthermore the hovered link in the location bar is also right-justified. If you expect users to scan their location bar to see the hovered link, they now have to change their eye location based on the length of the URL.

And it's dimmer text which makes it harder to read. Ok, I'll stop now. I think I've made it clear that I think this is a bad UX change :)