"By the way, it is Firefox that prevents anything being moved, so there's the challenge for the developers."
A challenge which they had addressed perfectly in the Firefox extension (i.e. it displayed at the right hand end of the status bar - you could even move it elsewhere on the bar using the "Organize Status Bar" extension) until this latest disastrous version!
I actually prefer it on the status bar - it makes more sense there since it is more of an indicator than a control - but all sorts of extensions - Google Notebook, Adblock Plus, Uppity, etc. - live there quite happily, so SA would be in good company like it always was.
Don't mean to be offensive, but it looks to me as though someone on the dev. team was simply trying to be clever. I hope (s)he is now thoroughly ashamed of themselves...