Bugzilla

(In reply to ST from comment #83)
> What is the reason or rational for the expanding address bar?

I'm not part of the UX team, so I will explain you what I gathered as a developer.
The team identified various problems through user research and experiments, that pointed out how many users are confused about the focused state of the urlbar, and the fact they can use it to search the Web, retrieve past information or even just solve immediate problems (My firefox is broken, how do I fix it?). The urlbar is one of the main access points of the browser, and as such it can largely improve the user experience. As a consequences various more studies and experiments have been run to understand how to improve the situation. Of course it's hard to satisfy everyone when you have millions of users, and that's why the change has been delayed for months while testing it in Nightly and Beta to refine it, and even now we're still iterating over users feedback and trying to find a good compromise for everyone. Of course the feature set is not complete yet, a lot of very interesting new features will come and use the new design for good.

(In reply to ST from comment #83)
> What is the reason or rational for the expanding address bar?

I'm not part of the UX team, so I will explain you what I gathered as a developer.
The team identified various problems through user research and experiments, that pointed out how many users are confused about the focused state of the urlbar, and the fact they can use it to search the Web, retrieve past information or even just solve immediate problems (My firefox is broken, how do I fix it?). The urlbar is one of the main access points of the browser, and as such it can largely improve the user experience. As a consequence more studies and experiments have been run to understand how to improve the situation. Of course it's hard to satisfy everyone when you have millions of users, and that's why the change has been delayed for months while testing it in Nightly and Beta to refine it, and even now we're still iterating over users feedback and trying to find a good compromise for everyone. Of course the feature set is not complete yet, a lot of very interesting new features will come and use the new design for good.