615906 - Firefox no longer displays connection status messages

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 586718

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, defect)

Description

[David K.]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101130 Firefox/4.0b8pre
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b8pre) Gecko/20101130 Firefox/4.0b8pre

With Firefox 4.0, there is no longer an option to display the status bar, however no adequate replacement has been introduced yet.
Although link targets are now shown in the location bar instead, the connection status messages (i.e. "connecting to", "waiting for data", etc.) are not.
This hinders browsing, as whenever a page does not load, you cannot tell whether no connection can established at all (which probably means the server is down and you can stop trying) or if it can connect, but is still waiting for data (in that case the server might just be crowded and you can expect the page to load in a bit).
And more importantly, you never get to know *which* server causes the holdup, so you don't even have the chance to block the problematic server using an extension.

It happens fairly often that some pages load scripts from different hosts. However, if one of said hosts is down, this can prevent the entire page from being displayed. With FF3.6 and earlier you could easily fix this by blocking scripts from the problematic host using an extension such as NoScript, but now this gets more difficult.

There are many ways to address this, the most reasonable one probably being to add an option to display the status bar like before.
Other options include to show the connection status messages in the location bar, the addon bar or to add an overlay at the bottom that is only shown when there is actually a message to display (Chromium uses this approach).
An additional option (which might make for good standard behavior) is to only display said status messages if connecting etc. takes longer than a certain amount of time (e.g. two seconds). However, this should be configurable.

Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Cork]

That information has been moved into the tab throbber instead.

see bug 602964.