The Statusbar is gone and the "lock" with it. Security information about a web page is shown by the Site Identity Button.
https://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Site+Identity+Button

You can add a padlock to the location bar with the Padlock add-on- https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/padlock-icon

The padlock before can give users a false sense that a site is secure by not supplying all of the information about a site and only shows that there is a secure connection and doesn't guarantee that you are connected to the right server.

Firefox 5.0 Site Identity displays a gray Passport Officer icon for the web site I visited (quality-s.qvc.com) stating that "This web site does not provide any identity information", is unencrypted or partially encrypted and is therefore unsafe. However, Internet Explorer 8 does display identity information for this web site, stating it is identified by VeriSign and the connection is encrypted.

Can you explain this discrepancy?

Also, you would not intuitively know that the Site Identity icon is located in the address bar or that it has replaced the security padlock.

Finally, it is interesting that mozilla.com only supplies "basic identity information" and not "complete identity information". What's up with that?

How is anyone supposed to know about the changes or even that there's a new add-on for it? My husband and I live and work on the web but it wasn't obvious to us what the 'new' changes might mean and had to come looking for the padlock when we realised it was no longer visible. In the past we haven't had to read up on updates but this one we have had to start looking for information.

The Site Identity Button is actually not a new thing as it has been in use since Firefox 3.0 as can be seen in Firefox 3.0 Release Notes.

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/3.0/releasenotes/ What's New in Firefox 3.0 One-click site info: Click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if your connection is protected from eavesdropping. Identity verification is prominently displayed and easier to understand. When a site uses Extended Validation (EV) SSL certificates, the site favicon button will turn green and show the name of the company you're connected to. (Try it here!)

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/5.0/releasenotes/ For the features of Firefox.

This isn't a reply, it's a request for someone to answer Seibei's point above. I'm new to Firefox (3 days). Last night, I had to book a hotel room. I loaded the hotel chain's site from my bookmarks (imported from IE9), and there was this warning - unsecure site, Get me out of Here!, woo-hoo. So I got out, put on a full Windows security scan, hid under the table... Then I went on my wife's laptop - still on Internet Explorer - called up the hotel chain from favo(u)rites, the VeriSign logo and padlock appeared, and I booked the room in the normal way. (This is a major UK hotel chain). Because I called up the site from previous visits, there's no question of a mistyped address leading to a scam site, for instance. So, to repeat Seibei's question - why the discrepancy?