Going down the rabbit hole, it seems Mozilla now have a hidden/closed issuetracker where you probably can find more information and reasoning for this change.
It's been frustrating to watch the precipitous decline of Mozilla and Firefox over the past decade.
Here's hoping AKling & Co ships an Android version of Ladybird. I'll happily pay for a browser developed by a team that cares about creating a quality product. That's vastly preferable to suffering the constant contempt that the people at Firefox seem to have for their ~~most ardent~~ few remaining supporters.
Edit: The Ladybird faq[0] says:
>Will Ladybird work on mobile devices?
>We don't have anyone actively working on an Android or iOS port. More effort will be put into mobile once we have the desktop versions in a good state.
>While there is the start of an Android port in the project repository, mobile is not a priority at the moment.
As yet another entry in the long cavalcade of inexplicable user-hostile changes, Firefox for Android has stopped displaying anything but the TLD at the top of the screen, unless you explicitly edit it. The bugtracker thread makes it clear that this is a deliberate change, though none of the deliberation seems to have been public. My best non-conspiracy guess would be that it is rationalised with an argument along the lines of hypothetical users being fooled by phishing websites along the lines of http://www.fake.com/1/2/3/http/www.real.com/, but surely this would have been prevented by the default left-justification and could have been reinforced with colour if they were so concerned.
What they deleted is called a postage stamp user interface. Where you use a small part of the screen to interact with something big. Good riddance of bad rubbish.
The usual good replacement is a small touchable area that shows the essential part and leads to a full-screen editing interface.
I hate it too, but to be fair we signed up for this when we decided to install Firefox Nightly instead of the stable version. As the author of the change writes:
> This is a partial implementation of the URL bar, this will have to be addressed in phase 2 when the address bar is reworked.
Now, if this partial implementation makes it into the stable version as-is, that would certainly be a failure of release management, but otherwise it's just the nightly acting as testing ground for half-baked stuff.
Well, except you were forced to use Nightly if you wanted to use any unapproved extensions (i.e. the vast majority of them).
I would fully expect no improvements before this lands in stable. To add insult to injury, they might even say that they trialled it in Nightly and found it to be a great success.
