Status bar or ANY way to view link URLs
I should not have to ask this, but somehow this essential feature has been removed *again*. How in the world do we view the URLs of links in Windows 10 now? The status bar has been totally disappeared, and although there are a number of add-ons, so many of them are about other kinds of status, or only show the URL in limited circumstances, that I'm having trouble figuring out which ones offer the basic view-URL-on-hover. Does anyone have recommendations?
Even better, who can explain why it's a good idea to make it hard for users to see this absolutely vital information? If security is important then it's important to make it easy for users to see where links go before clicking on them. Full stop. And even if the web were somehow magically totally safe, people don't want to waste their time and bandwidth playing guessing games. We want to know what something is before we bother to open it up. Why is that so very hard to understand?????
தீர்வு தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டது
The link should appear in either the lower left or lower right corner when hovering. It is overlaid on the page itself and does not appear in a bar.
There is no built-in way to hide this message, but if you have a userChrome.css file, that could be relevant to why you don't see it.
I don't know whether it's relevant, but sometimes the settings file that stores window positions and dimensions becomes corrupted with nonsensical values. You can rename the file and have Firefox rebuild it. Here's how:
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, on the Profile Folder row, click the "Open Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.
Leaving that window open, switch back to Firefox and Exit, either:
- "3-bar" menu button > Exit
- (menu bar) File > Exit
Pause while Firefox finishes its cleanup, then rename xulstore.json to something like xulstoreOLD.json. If you see a file named localstore.rdf, it's ancient now, you can delete it.
Start Firefox back up again. Do windows display normally again?
When Firefox rebuilds the file, the menu bar and bookmarks toolbar probably will be hidden. You can use one of these methods to show the toolbar list and select the desired bars there:
- right-click (on Mac Ctrl+click) a blank spot on the tab bar (or the "+" button)
- (menu bar) View > Toolbars
On Windows, tap the Alt key to activate the menu bar temporarily. - in Customize mode > Toolbars button (see: Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars)
To turn on the Bookmarks Toolbar or Menu Bar, click it on the list.
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தீர்வு தேர்ந்தெடுக்கப்பட்டது
The link should appear in either the lower left or lower right corner when hovering. It is overlaid on the page itself and does not appear in a bar.
There is no built-in way to hide this message, but if you have a userChrome.css file, that could be relevant to why you don't see it.
I don't know whether it's relevant, but sometimes the settings file that stores window positions and dimensions becomes corrupted with nonsensical values. You can rename the file and have Firefox rebuild it. Here's how:
Open your current Firefox settings (AKA Firefox profile) folder using either
- "3-bar" menu button > "?" Help > Troubleshooting Information
- (menu bar) Help > Troubleshooting Information
- type or paste about:support in the address bar and press Enter
In the first table on the page, on the Profile Folder row, click the "Open Folder" button. This should launch a new window listing various files and folders in Windows Explorer.
Leaving that window open, switch back to Firefox and Exit, either:
- "3-bar" menu button > Exit
- (menu bar) File > Exit
Pause while Firefox finishes its cleanup, then rename xulstore.json to something like xulstoreOLD.json. If you see a file named localstore.rdf, it's ancient now, you can delete it.
Start Firefox back up again. Do windows display normally again?
When Firefox rebuilds the file, the menu bar and bookmarks toolbar probably will be hidden. You can use one of these methods to show the toolbar list and select the desired bars there:
- right-click (on Mac Ctrl+click) a blank spot on the tab bar (or the "+" button)
- (menu bar) View > Toolbars
On Windows, tap the Alt key to activate the menu bar temporarily. - in Customize mode > Toolbars button (see: Customize Firefox controls, buttons and toolbars)
To turn on the Bookmarks Toolbar or Menu Bar, click it on the list.
Update:
Well, now I have to backtrack. Firefox has started showing URLs on hover again in the bottom right corner of my screen. I swear it stopped working a couple of days ago and was not working when I wrote the above. So I'll apologize for the rant and change my question to the following:
Since there's no longer such a thing as the status bar, and I can't find anything in settings/options that would turn this feature on or off, what should I do to restore it if it stops working again? I know that posting another complaint here isn't the way to go, even though it seems to have worked once
Thanks so much for your speedy, patient, and comprehensive reply, @jscher2000! It came while I was writing my retraction and I didn't see it until just now. I've bookmarked it for future reference.
The more I think about it the more I wonder if my problem wasn't a lingering result of some very weird issues caused by a Windows update a few days ago. I can't see how it would be related to those issues, but several of them seemed unrelated to each other, and though the ones I indentified have resolved themselves I'm not quite sure how all of that happened either. As long as it's all working again I'm not going to worry about it. Ready to close this one up and move on.
Let's cross our fingers it doesn't happen again.