Hrm, as a power user doesn't that mean you are more comfortable customizing, like turning the address bar back on?
Also, eliminating the address bar seems to be a trend among the major browsers, if anything I would expect Firefox to be easier to revert the behavior (see how easy it is to switch back from tabs-on-top, for example).
The problem is, Mozilla has moved steadily in the direction of making it harder, if not impossible, to re-enable features they've decided that we don't need.
Basically, here's my beef: I own both an iPhone and a computer with a 30" Dell monitor. They are not even remotely alike. Design decisions aimed at making the browser on my PC look and work more like the one on my iPhone are wrongheaded, misguided, and arguably batshit insane, from the perspective of someone who has actually seen, and in fact regularly uses, both platforms.
Vertical space, for one thing, is not at a premium on my PC. It should not be treated as a resource to be conserved at all costs.
I understand the sentiment. But to give you an example of the disparity between someone like you and the general public and how clueless they can be; my wife once saw a hash bang in the url bar and ran to me in a panic. She was scared she had gotten some kind of computer virus.
I understand this sentiment, too. But after working without the status bar in Chrome (autohide, I guess) for a while, I got used to it and now actually quite like it. And I think hiding it by default, especially for app tabs, is actually quite nice and I like the idea of having more space for the actual content.
As long as there's an easy way to invoke the url bar, I'll be happy.
Never cared for autohide on taskbars etc, I find it distracting to have things moving in and out. However, I do have two high resolution monitors and therefore like having a real menu bar, and real statusbar. Please, browser makers, quit trying to make that difficult.
Although one thing I'd like, which I've seen no one implement yet is to have links urls as tooltips on mouseover. Perhaps below another tooltip if it existed. Shorter distance to move my eyes.