With the release of Firefox 4, a change was the addition of a new ‘compact’ menu.
While the aim of this was to be useful, I can say I have never found it intuitive and prefer the old menu system. In fact, the only reason why I kept it, was that I appreciated the screen space it saved me.
Recently I came across the Firefox Add-on Personal Menu, an extension which allows you to customise which menu items appear in this compact menu.
Using this extension I was able to add the previous menu system (File, Edit, View etc.) into this compact menu. I could have the best of both worlds – saving screen space but the familiarity of the old menu system.
HowTo
After installing Personal Menu from Firefox Add-ons, open Firefox’s Add-ons Manager and then click the Preferences button in the Personal Menu item.
Remove all current menu items in the compact menu by clicking the Remove (–) button.
Then add the ‘old’ menus into the compact menu by selecting each menu under ‘Menu Bar’ in the left sidebar and clicking the Add (+) button.
Once you have done this, click ‘Apply’ and it should be done!
To restore the compact menu to its previous state, either disable/remove the Personal Menu add-on, or In the ‘Advanced’ tab, (within the Personal Menu preferences) click Restore…