Firefox losing its menu bar
Last night, Herself was browsing the Internet. She came across a site that claimed that her Javascript was disabled.
The laptop in question is running Firefox 5 on Linux Mint 11.
When I went to check Firefox I discovered that the main menu bar was missing. The address bar was there along with the favourites bar, but no sign of the all important menu. I tried some other programmes and they all ran normally, so it was obviously a Firefox problem.
I browsed the Internet and found that that wasn’t much help.
Eventually, by trial and error I found the solution, which is (of course) very simple –
Open a terminal and type ‘firefox –safe-mode’ (without the quotes).
A window will pop up. Simply select “Reset toolbars and controls’ and that’s it. Everything will be restored to normal.
-oOo-
While I am on the subject of Firefox, I have been running the nightly version of Firefox 8 for the last week or so. (whatever happened to 6 and 7? 
). Visually, there is little difference between 5 and 8. The difference though is in speed. It really is lightning on steroids. I started using it occasionally, but it is now my default. I love it!
Both of my machines run Firefox ver 5 and I’ve never run into any problems like you describe. My laptop is running Linux Mint 11 and my desktop is running Windows XP pro. On both Firefox runs alot faster than ver. 4 ever did. Isn’t ver. 8 a beta of sorts. It’s not a full release yet. Is it?
Woops – there was a typo running right through that post. I meant she is running 5, not 4.
Unfortunately as I wasn’t at the machine when the fault occurred, I don’t know exactly what happened. It may have been a spontaneous failure, or it may have been a user action. I have been using Firefox for a decade or so now and I rarely have any problems with it. I have seen a situation where ALL applications spontaneously lose their menu bars, and the fix for that is to Compiz Fusion Icon in the Control Centre and then to right click the Icon and select Reload Window Manager.
I’m running Firefox 8 from the Nightly builds so if it isn’t early Beta, it’s Alpha. If you think 5 is fast, wait ’til you try 8!
The menu bar is hidden by default (turns into the ‘Firefox button’ located on the left hand side) To show the menu bar, right-click on a blank space on the toolbar and context menu that comes up will show a checklist of all available tool bars. The Menu bar will be the first one at the top, all you have to do is check it and the ‘Firefox button’ disappears and the menu bar re-appears.
The other way is to click the ‘Firefox button’ and hover over ‘Preferences’ and the same checklist will show in the sub-menu that appears.
That was the strange thing about the fault – I tried all the usual right-clicks but there was no way to restore the toolbar menu. It had decided to vanish and that was that.