What Is It?

A Firefox Add-on that allows you to set multiple status bars and move content between them to display what you want to see.

Why Would You Want It?

Many of the Firefox add-ons use the status bar to display information or as a clickable control to set options or display a menu to use the add-on. This can not only leave the statusbar cluttered but also create problems in the width of the page being wider than the screen. This in turn creates problems in viewing the page and not being able to see all the tabs. With Statusbars you can get rid of the width and clutter problems quickly and easily

What Does It Do - The Essentials?

Summary:

• Provides multiple statusbars
• Allows statusbar items to be reorganized

Pros: What’s Good?

• Freeware

• Overcomes statusbar clutter
• Overcomes Firefox width rendering problems
• Simple to Use

Cons:What’s Not So Good?

• Lack of documentation
• Not entirely intuitive in use (without documentation)
• Settings don’t always “stick” to the defined bar
• Would only display the first two bars in customize mode*
• Unhides elements that should remain hidden
• Developer has not updated in over a year

This is a rather long list but I think the problems Statusbars overcomes outweighs the “Cons”

*This may be a problem created by other Add-ons I have installed or some other quirk of my test system.

Update - I have found this is on my review version of Firefox. On another version all 3 statusbars show for customisation. However, I also find on this alternative version that some elements won’t drag and drop between the bars. 

More About What it Does in Detail:

Statusbars installs just like any other Firefox add-on and is available at the Mozilla Add-ons website.

Quote from the Mozilla Add-ons Statusbars page:

To switch statusbar you simply scroll while the mouse is over the statusbar. You can also right click and select the statusbar you want by name. You can set up your statusbars so you have one for the site you are on (greasemonkey, adblock, rip, etc), one for general information (forcastfox, gmail notifier, stock ticker, etc) and one for webdesign (tidy, web developer, firebug, etc).

Works with:

Firefox: 1.0 – 2.0.0.*

I also missed this important comment from the developer when I first tried it out:

Developer Comments

This version works on FF2. It lets you drag and drop the statusbar icons when you are in customize mode, making it easy to rearrange things the way you want.

It took me quite a while to work put you could drag and drop the elements between the bars.

There is also some further information at the developers website

General Use of Statusbars

Once installed it displays a coloured square to the left end of the statusbar.

Right clicking on the coloured square displays a menu that allows you to select the bar you want or customize Statusbars.

Clicking on customize displays the Customize Statusbars window and stacks the statusbars at the bottom of the screen where the elements can be dragged and dropped between bars or within a bar to reorganize.

(I named the bars 1, 2 & 3 for ease but you can use more meaningful names)

Two issues occurred in the review setup, sometimes the reorganised elements don’t stay put but revert back to their original position or original (default) status bar. The second was that only the first two statusbars were stacked, meaning that you couldn’t drag and drop element to or within the third bar.

Clicking on the New Bar button or the Edit Bar button brings up the same edit screen (just a different title)

The screen above shows the colour picker accessed by clicking on the colour box.

Clicking on the Advanced button changes the Edit screen as shown below

A list of the text names for the statusbar elements is now displayed. By cutting and pasting the text elements from one bar’s edit window to another or moving the text lines within the window you can achieve the same thing as dragging and dropping edits. Albeit this is a slow and painstaking process but it overcomes the problem of a status bar not being displayed in edit mode.

What are the Technical Details & Compatibility?

What is the My Free Review Experience?

I find this a very useful Firefox add-on that overcomes particular problems I have with a lot of Add-ons installed which use the statusbar in one way or another.
As previously noted these problems are clutter of information but more importantly the fact that the status bar width effects the page width. This results in the page being wider than screen but with the horizontal scroll bar and the tab rows being cut off in the middle as in the screenshot below.

(The above screenshot is from a resized window to fit on the blog page but the same thing happens in full screen, Statusbars is also installed but the elements have not been assigned to the second and third bars))

Personally I rate this as very useful but would benefit from further work:

Simple - Does a Useful Job

What Could Make it be Better?

Deal with minor bugs to fix items in the bar they are allocated to

Display all bars in customize mode  See Update note above

Stack bars option to display all bars in general use

What Other Posts are Relevant?

Why I decided to Write This Blog

What are the Tags?

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Add-ons, Freeware, Pro Reviewer, Programs, Software, Utilities, Windows, Windows XP

What Other Resources are There?

Popularity: 14% [?]

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 4:41 pm and is filed under Firefox Add-ons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.