Like Google Chrome, Mozilla has recently made a stylistic change to the way website URLs are displayed in the address bar. If you were paying attention or otherwise around in the web’s infancy you probably recall a time where web addresses were literally verbalized as h t t p colon slash slash. It wasn’t too long before the web protocol of http:// was redundant in conversation and web browsing – individuals or browsers knew the intent and therefore the preceded text on web addresses became unnecessary. However, true to its roots, web browsers continued to display the protocols in the address bar. Today, in an effort of simplification of technology to new users, browsers such as Chrome and Firefox have dropped the text all together.

If you’re a purist it’s rather simple to revert the change in Firefox.

Under about:config use the Filter field to locate the key titled browser.urlbar.trimURLs. You’ll notice the value defaults to True – a double click on the key will toggle the value to False and restore the functionality to Firefox.

You may have also noticed that Firefox will accentuate the domain portion of a web address while dimming or greying out the rest of the text in the URL. This visualization can be toggled with the key browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled.

Both changes are applied immediately without the need to restart the browser.