OHNOES!
Apparently, status bar IS GONE! ;_;
But fret not, as here is this nice add-on, which gives you a customizable status bar instead of that annoying pop-up!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/
Why on earth would they get rid of the status bar? How do they expect you to know where a link goes before you click on it?
because it STILL shows when you HOVER over it.
FYI, You can have BOTH Firefox 4 AND older versions. That's how I managed since Beta 4 when most addons were incompatible or somewhat buggy betas. That way you can test it instead of going on hearsay.
Regarding the forced updates... I'm not altogether sure that you can opt out but, if you can't, then it's acting just like Opera and Chrome who lead the way in forcing updates automatically. That can be somewhat troubling for the user but it's great news for the developer. No program should force you to update when you don't want though, sometimes you just need to get something done.
You might want to look at some demos/experiments with htm5, CSS3 and WebGl now so that you truly appreciate the benefits of browser with that kind of support.
https://demos.mozilla.org/en-US/http://www.chromeexperiments.com/http://developer.apple.com/safaridemos/ (I'm not sure if they're still spoofing by browser but chrome should work for all of them)
Instead, they have a popup that says where the link goes. Its also like a fun mini-game feature, because where it appears is context related, so it gives you the joy of hunting down where that rascal appeared THIS time.
It appears on the
right left unless you're using the Ctrl-F search bar.
I'm not managing to replicate the exact hack I did at home with keyword.url to be able to use the url to search single words. You can always do "+ word" but it's not exactly the same.