In the course text we use for our beginning HTML text, the author has you write some text to the status bar to demonstrate how to work with Event Handlers. As you have probably noticed by the now, the status bar code does not seem to work with Firefox. The reason is that the option is turned off by default. See the following URL for more information.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/DOM/window.status
According to Mozilla, “This property does not work in default configuration of Firefox and some other browsers: setting window.status has no effect on the text displayed in the status bar. To allow scripts change the the status bar text, the user must set the dom.disable_window_status_change preference to false in the about:config screen.”
To modify the Firefox about:config screen, type in “about:config” in the address field. In Firefox 3.6.3 you will be presented with a warning that changing the configuration setting could damage the application. Click the “I’ll be careful. I promise” button.
You will be presented with a list of application system variables and their settings. At the top of the page, you’ll see a filter (search) field.
Type in “status.”
A number of configuration settings will show in the filtered results. In that list, look for dom.disable_window_status_change in the list of settings. Notice the value is set to false. This means the window status cannot be changed.
Double-click on that setting. You notice that the value changes to “true.”
Close out the window so you do not modify any other settings by accident.
You should now be able to change the status bar using Javascript event handlers.