I miss the popup menu of recent pages in this tab, that was beside the back/forward buttons in Firefox 3.
The bar at the bottom of the window has gone away, to save space for content; status notices now appear in floaters over content, in the same place. I’m not in love with this behavior.
For the popup menu of recent pages in this tab, try right-clicking the back button on the toolbar. For the latter, try to look for a setting like “Status Bar” in the View menu.
“Add-on Bar” puts a bar below the content, but the status notice appears above that bar!