Ubuntu
firefox package

Firefox menu bar is missing.

Asked by Charles Pergiel

Just installed version 11.10. Firefox menu bar is missing. Right clicking on empty space in tab bar pops up a menu, but no selection for the menu bar.

In the Firefox window there is
- the title bar with the minimize,maximize and close buttons,
- the tab bar
- the navigation bar with the box for the URL and the Google search box
- the current web page with a scroll bar along the right hand side.

On one hand it's kind of nice. My screen has limited vertical resolution, and I hardly ever use anything on that menu bar, so it's nice not having precious screen real estate taken up with something so rarely used. On the other hand, I do use some of that stuff occasionally so it would be nice to have some way to get to it.

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Ubuntu firefox Edit question
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Eliah Kagan
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marcus aurelius (adbiz) said : 		#1

move the cursor to the title bar and the menu bar will appear.

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Charles Pergiel (c-pergiel-c) said : 		#2

No, the menu bar does not appear. At least it does not appear in the same window. I did notice something funny going on with the desktop menu bar, the one that goes across the top of the screen. I can't really tell what's going on because my display cuts off the top 90% of that menu bar. On my screen it is only about 5 or 10 pixels tall.

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Best Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure) said : 		#3

Is the problem that you want the menu bar to appear at the top of the Firefox window, rather than at the top of the screen?

If the answer to the first question is yes, then please see http://maketecheasier.com/remove-app-menu-in-ubuntu-oneiric/2011/10/14. This explains how to disable having the menu bar for non-fullscreen windows at the top of the screen, as well as how to do it specifically for Firefox. If those instructions work for you, you can mark this question as Solved.

But if that is not what you want, or those instructions don't work for you, then please post another reply in this question so more work on this problem can occur.

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Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure) said : 		#4

Correction: "If the answer to the first question is yes, then please see..." --> "If so, then please see..."

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Charles Pergiel (c-pergiel-c) said : 		#5

Thanks Eliah Kagan, that solved my question.

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Charles Pergiel (c-pergiel-c) said : 		#6

The problem is that somebody changed the way the Firefox menu appeared, and they didn't ask me first. I'm hurt. That's what the problem was.

I had a problem with the menu because, on my display screen, the Ubuntu desktop is cropped on all four sides, which makes accessing anything along the edges problematic.

P.S. That web page you referenced was almost as bad as the Bloomberg page I was complaining about earlier. Too much fancy stuff. Locked up the mouse, but not the keyboard, so I had to actually type the command in, letter by letter. Oh! The drudgery!

P.P.S. I did not think you could solve a question. You can solve a problem, and you can answer a question. Maybe those are just idioms and the phrases would be just as valid if you swapped the objects. "Solving a question" just grates on my ear.

Revision history for this message
Eliah Kagan (degeneracypressure) said : 		#7

I'm glad you were able to get your application menus back in the application windows where you wanted them.

"The problem is that somebody changed the way the Firefox menu appeared, and they didn't ask me first. I'm hurt. That's what the problem was."

Your computer was upgraded from Ubuntu 10.10 to Ubuntu 11.04, or from Ubuntu 11.04 to Ubuntu 11.10, without asking you? That would indeed be a very serious problem. However, if what you mean is that you chose to upgrade to a newer release, even though the release you were using was still fully supported, and then found that some things were not to your liking, then I must ask: Which of the thousands of changes from Maverick to Natty or from Natty to Oneiric do you think you should have been asked about? You might have a reasonable answer to this question, but such an answer would in effect be a major narrowing of your general objection. (Unless your objection really isn't general at all, but is actually so narrow as to be exclusively about Firefox's application menu, such that any other change would not make you feel similarly hurt.)

Ubuntu aims (and usually succeeds) to provide a very reliable user experience within a release -- the interface is changed as little as possible (virtually not at all), including each applications' interfaces, even when the system is updated to correct security and serious stability problems. Ubuntu developers manually integrate upstream fixes, to make this so (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates for details). But the *point* of going to a new release is to get newer software, which behaves differently and looks different.

If you didn't want Ubuntu to be different when you upgraded to a newer release, what were you thinking? If you weren't willing for it to be different, why did you *change* it? The Ubuntu project did not install the new version of Ubuntu on your computer. Canonical Ltd. did not install the new version of Ubuntu on your computer. *You* installed the new version of Ubuntu on your computer.

For future reference, you can test Ubuntu from a live CD/DVD/USB to see if you like the changes, before upgrading. This may not be a good way to avoid subtle changes or changes in some applications that you might not have time to test. But for major interface changes, this is always sufficient.

On the other hand, if it is not clear to users that it is a good idea to test with a live system, then in my opinion, that it itself a bug that should be corrected.

But even if that is the case...aren't you shown the release notes when you upgrade (https://wiki.ubuntu.com/OneiricOcelot/ReleaseNotes)? I actually do not know the answer to that question, as I have thus far only upgraded to Oneiric well before its release date (to help test), and I did it with do-release-upgrade rather than the Update Manager. Or is the problem that the information about Ubuntu Classic being removed is not sufficiently prominent in the release notes?

I am not at all convinced that your perspective or views are wrong, but it seems like you are essentially claiming that it is unacceptable that new, different software was new and different. In order for your criticisms to be taken as reasonable, I think you'll have to make them less general, or at least more specific.

"P.S. That web page you referenced was almost as bad as the Bloomberg page I was complaining about earlier. Too much fancy stuff. Locked up the mouse, but not the keyboard, so I had to actually type the command in, letter by letter. Oh! The drudgery!"

This did not happen on my Oneiric i386 machine. I have tested with chromium-browser 14.0.835.202~r103287-0ubuntu1 and firefox 7.0.1+build1+nobinonly-0ubuntu2. You may want to post a new question to investigate this.

'P.P.S. I did not think you could solve a question. You can solve a problem, and you can answer a question. Maybe those are just idioms and the phrases would be just as valid if you swapped the objects. "Solving a question" just grates on my ear.'

Answered and Solved are different statuses for a question. See https://help.launchpad.net/Answers/AskingForHelp.

If you want either some official answer or the possibility of a change in response to your criticism or both, then I think you should ask a question or report a bug about Launchpad itself. I would recommend asking a question first (https://answers.launchpad.net/launchpad/+addquestion), but both questions and bugs in Launchpad tend to be responded to quickly, so either way should work. Of course, I recommend that you only file a bug if you can describe precisely what is wrong with the current behavior and, ideally, also suggest a workable solution. (I'm not saying that you should *generally* only file bugs when you have that kind of clarity, but since the people who answer Launchpad questions are, in large part, Canonical employees who develop or directly work with developers of Launchpad, posting the question first may be a very efficient way to gain better clarity if you are unsure of what your bug report should say.)

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Charles Pergiel (c-pergiel-c) said : 		#8

I really enjoyed your reply (very much, I have tears from laughing so hard). Sorry to be so long getting back to you, life interferes sometimes.

As you no doubt surmised, my original question complaint was just a little facetious. I started this foray (my Nth) into Linux about a month ago, and I have been having all kinds of problems. Nothing serious, nothing I can't get around, nothing that will not be fixed, eventually. But each step forward seems to result in falling into a bottomless pit full of snakes. Some of them are because of my peculiar set of hardware, some are because I am cursed with being persnickity, and some because they are just plain difficult problems. Like just now the spell checker has high-lighted a word, but I can't get the popup menu of spelling options to appear. What's up with that? (No, don't answer that. If I make any progress on my other 99 problems I may eventually post it.)

Keeping up with the current release is double edged sword. Yes, I want things to stay the same, and no, I don't want anything to change. Once I have learned my way around a program I want it to stay that way. I don't want to waste any time learning new ways to do the same old thing, especially since it is probably going to be "stupid" (my kids favorite word to describe things they don't like).

On the other hand, not updating your software and sticking with the original version means you won't see any of the new stuff that people develop, and while most of it is useless trash (another man's treasure), every once in a while you come across something that is actually useful. If you don't update, you won't see it. The other problem with not updating is eventually you will be running stuff that is so old that no one will care if you have a problem.

So for this go round I plan on keeping this system updated, at least until I get it sorted out enough that it works well enough at it's intended application.