Restore Status Bar and Old Layout on Newer Firefox Versions (11, 12, 13)

Starting from Firefox 4, certain things changed in Firefox lots of users thought wasn’t right. One of the things most people missed was the status / progress bar. It’s hard to figure out why it was removed but like most people, I missed it. One other thing was the way tabs was arranged, and some toolbars that was hidden. Till date, I’m yet to get used to the new look and after every new Firefox installation on any of my machines, I always tweak it to make the browser look like the old Firefox 3.

Granted, the new layout looks sort of modern since that’s what Opera, Google Chrome and the rest of them now looks like but that old layout is what I, like some people, prefer. That single menu labelled Firefox at the top left annoys me… maybe I’m old school, but I love the old look more

Of course you can make the new versions of Firefox look like what it used to be and some users already know how to achieve that but not everyone knows their way around the settings. This tweaks work for Firefox 4 down to Firefox 13 and newer updates that’ll be released in the near future I guess.

Restoring the toolbars

The first thing I normally do is to restore the tool bars: The bookmark tool bars, addon tool bar and menu bar.

- Click the menu labelled Firefox at the top-left and go to Options. Click on Menu bar

- The old menu should now be restored but wait, we’re no done yet. Go to View > Toolbars > Click on Bookmarks toolbar.

- Repeat the same thing and click on Add-on toolbars.

Restoring tabs location

This is totally optional but if you think the position of those tabs isn’t right, you can move them to where they used to be.

Go to View > Toolbars > Unmark Tabs on top.

This puts your tabs further lower like it used to look like on Firefox 3.

And finally, getting back the status bar!

Perhaps the little progress bar at the bottom was considered useless but actually, it’s not. If you’re on a slow connection, it’s the only way to know how far you’ve gone and how long you have to wait before your page opens. More importantly, the status bar clearly shows which address my browser is connecting to apart from the present page, location of external resources like images, scripts and everything. I never open a page without looking at it.

Restoring it is very simple. There are more than one add-ons for this purpose but I prefer Status-4-evar. I’ve been using it right from Firefox 4 and works with the latest version.

With all these tweaks, you latest version of Firefox should look just like an older version but if you think you don’t like the changes, you can always revert them.