Firefox 7’s modified URL view. The Firefox developers have followed the Chrome and Opera decision to not display “http://” when showing URLs in the address bar. The modifications have just been made to the “nightly” development version of the browser which will become Firefox 7 later this year. The change is aimed at making URLs more readable. The changes to the address bar will also see elements of a URL such as “www.” displayed in a lighter font colour. Only http:// URLs will be affected; like Chrome, Firefox will display https:// URLs in full.

Firefox 7 will also drop the trailing slash from URLs, but according to the commit only when this leaves the “root path”; any other path will retain the trailing slash. Firefox 7, which is expected to be released before the end of the year, will enter “Aurora” phase (alpha) on 5 July. Firefox 6 will move to beta on the same day.