Firefox is copying a lot of features from Chrome these days to play catch-up. From the rapid-release schedule to the location bar not showing http:// unless it’s an https site. It’s actually the latter of those two that is frustrating me the most. Copy and pasting a lot of URLS is pretty common for both my day job and writing online and Firefox will drop the http:// from the URL when you copy it in select cases.
Firefox has a quirk that Chrome has somehow figured out. Even though Chrome hides the http://, it will still grab it when you copy the URL. Firefox will do the same unless you edit the URL at all. If you trim off the UTM values at the end of some URLs or do other edits to it, you will only copy the text you can see – not the hidden http://.
To get Firefox to just drop the act and show the http:// in the address bar like it used to, we just have to flip a setting in the about:config.
In the address bar, type about:config and hit enter.
In the filter, type browser.urlbar.trimURLs.
Double-click on the Preference Name to toggle it to False.
Afterwards, you can browse around like normal and see the full URL in the address bar.
In the about:config, you can also set browser.urlbar.formatting.enabled to false in order to turn off the URL highlighting.