14 DAY TRIAL // Firefox 5 may have been underwhelming, for users expecting something more like what Firefox 4 brought new, but the new Mozilla development cycle is going full steam now and future updates will be more substantial, though clearly not on the lines of previous major Firefox versions.
From now on, small constant changes is the name of the game, but, as anyone using Chrome knows, these can add up quickly and you'll be running a completely new browser every several months or so without even noticing.
One of these small changes, inspired perhaps by what other browsers have done already, is the removal of the 'http://' prefix from URLs in the AwesomeBar, leading to a cleaner address bar.
The change is subtle, but it makes a big difference in every day browsing. Google Chrome introduced this more than a year ago, after testing it for a while, and Opera has the feature as well.
For regular websites, this means that the URL of the page itself will only be visible, making it easier to see the website you're on. However, if you copy the URL, you get the leading 'http' part as well, a subtle but useful tweak that Chrome struggled as well when it first introduced the feature.
For encrypted pages, starting with 'https://' the entire URL will be displayed, to make it very clear to users that they are visiting a secured version of the page or website.
Users will have to wait until Firefox 7 lands to get this one, and that's still about three months away, but it's interesting to be able to see some of the features that most users won't have access to for several more months, already working.
Of course, all of this will be rather moot, or significantly less important once or whether the latest trend, of removing the address bar altogether and only displaying it on demand, catches on. Chrome is already experimenting with this and there is a growing crowd of people saying URLs are becoming irrelevant for a big part of regular browsing.
