Jennifer Boriss – user experience designer with the Mozilla Corporation – has been discussing the removal of the status bar on her blog in a three part series.
In the latest and final proposal, Firefox 4 loses its status bar in the majority of cases, allowing some add-ons the ability to place their bottom-anchored functionality on an automatically resizing status bar, much like the status bar in Google Chrome, which appears only sometimes. Not proposed by Boriss is the ability for the status bar to move below the window chrome when hovered. Without such an ability, content could become unreachable by some users. With such ability, the status bar becomes less usable and more finicky.
Overall, the removal of the status bar is a welcome change, which gives users and websites a larger usable content area.
Unless of course you’re one of the many of us that actually does useful things with the status bar.
Those of us who use Firefox aren’t going to keep using it if they keep changing it to be like those other browsers that we don’t use because we don’t like the choices those browsers have made. ie: if we wanted a browser like Chrome, we’d run Chromium.