From the same page you referred to:

Applebee's logo is an apple, too. Their name contains an "apple". And they sell food just like AppleADay. Under the same logic, they have to threaten Applebee's too?!

Now explain to my grandmother, who just got her first email last week, how and why she needs to do that.

On the other hand, the oppressive governments over there will LOVE that. It's probably even better than insecure FB or Twitter since everything ultimately goes to the people's emails.
As someone from one the mentioned countries, I'd like to ask Microsoft, do you realize now you might be very well putting many people at a greater risk of being arrested or killed. People are being KILLED for expressing some of their opinions in some of these places these days.

SHAME ON YOU MICROSOFT

OK, correcting myself in one point. My claim that the url popup was transparent turned out to so because of KDE Oxigen them I'm using with FF. Reverting to the default FF4b12 theme, the URL popup does hide the contents behind it.
However, the other scenario I raised about fake links is still very plausible IMHO.

A malicious page can have a fake link - text that looks like a link, shows the URL on the bottom of the page using JS when mouse is over the fake link. FF won't hide that with its own popup since it's not a real link.
I can also give more complex scenarios based on the fact that FF shows the URL transparently. (Think about floating

The URL is actually displayed at the bottom of the page in a "pseudo-status-bar" overlaying the page contents. And guess what happens if the background of the page at that area is dark or matching the URL font color.!
Do I see phishing attacks coming soon?

Last time I checked, by default login credentials are sent without encryption over http. Stealing the password is very easy in this case. Everyone should make sure to use https instead. There's an option in the user account to enable https all the time.