The Status Bar at the bottom of the Firefox window has changed. The new Status Bar only shows page loading activity and link previews. When neither of those are needed it simply disappears. Please see What happened to the Status Bar? for more.

It doesn't reliably show page loading activity. Also, there's no progress bar (the green bar showing how close the page is to completely loading). This is a very frustrating issue.

Have you tried the Status-4-Evar extension?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/status-4-evar/

Most of the features which were present on the old Statusbar are available with this extension.

I appreciate the suggestion, but I'd prefer not have to add on any more extensions. But if you're right, and an add-on is the only way to get this, then that's helpful information (even though I won't be dowloading it). My system is already slow, and it's getting slower with every add-on. I've actually deleted some of my add-ons that aren't really essential. Which is the whole point of an add-on anyway - i.e. it's for something "extra".

It's so frustrating that something so simple and useful was removed in FF v.8. There are a lot of people out there who consider this an integral part of any browser. Not sure why Mozilla went to the effort of removing it. Then again I'm not sure why they did a lot of the things they did w/ v.8. Seems like they've put a higher priority on making it look cute, and more like IE in some ways. Cute is fine, but it shouldn't exclude functionality.

If you're right, and they only solution is an add-on, then I'll probably re-install v.3, which is supposedly the only older version still available from Mozilla. Last time I checked, you can't even get v.7 any more. Otherwise, I would have immediately uninstalled v.8 and reinstalled v.7.

... :(

Not removed but replaced by the Add-on bar.

Firefox 7.0.* would have been same with the Status bar anyways (since Firefox 4.0) and it is behind on security fixes.