This simple add-on for Firefox will give you the old menu bar layout under a single button – so you can kind of mix the best of the old and the new when it comes to using Firefox 4. It adds a compact menu button to the navigation toolbar and then hides the big Firefox button. 

You can fully customize the compact menu by right-clicking on the new toolbar button and selecting "Customize". From here you can drag the menu button to a new location inside of the Firefox navigation layout.

While there are other add-ons that will do the same job – I think Compact Menu 2 might do it the best.  You can pick it up from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Definitely not.  You just have to reach it in a different way. 

To bring up a quick list of links you have previously browser to, simply right-click on the back button in Firefox 4. When you do so, the old drop down history list pops back up in all its glory – with up to 10 previous pages you have navigated to. 

Now, I do understand they did this to cut down on the clutter – however if I had not accidently right-clicked the back button to find it, I would have never known the functionality was there. 

Here is a little more about the add-on from the developer:

Now you can edit the Firefox Menu and change it to your personal and powerful one! Personal Menu provides you a couple of new helpful items that available to be put into Firefox Menu: Bookmark Items, History Items, Configuration(about:config), Restart. In addition, you may create toolbar-box (let you put toolbar-buttons inside), sub-menus and split-menus to organize your Firefox Menu!

To sum things up, if you are one of those people who thought, "Well, this menu item would be a lot better over here" or "Why is there no easy way to get to that feature" then this add-on was designed for you.  This add-on gives you the most control (in comparison to other add-ons like it) when it comes to really customizing everything that is shown under the Firefox button.

You can pick up the Personal Menu add-on from the Firefox Add-ons website.

By introducing this feature into the browser, for those minimal theme users, you can ditch the backward and forward browsing buttons in your navigation toolbar arrangement.  Via the options, you can set it to display the current page title in history menu if the current tab hasn’t had history yet, and also disable the history popup when the the Shift, Ctrl, or Alt keys are being pressed.

With the Tab History Menu extension installed, you can cut down on your browser’s navigation clutter or get one more way to browse your history.  It is a great addition to Firefox, no matter what way you use it.

The GMail Compactor user script will help you reclaim that space with style.

As you can see, from the picture above, after you install this Greasemonkey user script, everything from your Compose Mail link down to your Contacts link are now minimized into very pretty icons.  As an extra benefit, you also still get the count of how many new messages are in some of your folders, such as Spam.  If you want to maximize the vertical real estate in Gmail, then pick up the Gmail Compactor user script.  (found via Lifehacker)

When you middle-click a bookmarked item in the bookmarks (or in the history) you will open that web page up in a new tab, and the menu stays open, so you can do more clicking inside of it.  You can then click all the links you need to click and open up.  Once you are finished, hit the Esc button to close the menus (or you can click somewhere outside the menu, as well).  Here is one more handy tip from the developers:

Toggle the about:config value of extensions.stayopenmenu.useCtrlMeta from false to true to enable usage with Ctrl-click. See the homepage for more detailed instructions on how to turn on the Ctrl-click option, and further information about using with the Smart Location Bar.

For more help and support for the Stay-Open Menu extension, be sure to check out this thread:

• MozillaZine – Stay-Open Menu Support Thread

You can pick up the add-on via Firefox’s Add-on site or learn more about it via the official web site.  It might not be an add-on for all, but if this is a pet peeve of yours, you now have a solution.

Here is a little more about the Firefox extension from the developers:

termBlaster adds the ability to perform searches from your right-click (or context) menu using one of 110+ websites that range from search engines to encyclopedias to translators. Website lists are in XML format and can be modified in Places.

One would think that speed could come into play when trying to navigate through the search menus but you can do so quickly with little or no effort at all. All you do is highlight and right click the word you want to search and then select the search engine you want to use. They have shopping searches, review searches, torrent searches, map searches, too many to name.

Confused yet? Picnik is a really cool web site that allows you to edit your photos Online. Now when you mix that with the awesomeness that is Firefox – you have in your hands one heck of a nice tool.

Add a menu options and a toolbar icon to make importing images into Picnik easier. This extension adds a menu option when you right click on images to make it easy to pull the image into Picnik for editing. Firefox 2.0 users also menu options and a toolbar icon to take screen shots and import them into Picnik.

The thing that brings the magic together is the Picnik extension for Firefox. Might not be the time to uninstall Photoshop just yet – but give it some time and you might re-think that idea.

Usually folks are trying to figure out ways to make their menu bar shorter and not longer. I guess in this circumstance though adding the option to your toolbar might be increasing Firefox’s usability to some. The extention to help you get this job done is called Tabs Menu.

Adds a Tabs menu to the main menu that lets you easily change between tabs. Adds a Tabs menu to the main menu bar that lists all tabs in the current window. You can see the full titles for each tab and you can see more tabs in this vertical menu than in the standard horizontal tab bar.

Tabs Menu might not an extension on everybody’s top ten list – but I think it is well worth checking out.

Tiny Menu – Replace the standard menu bar with a tiny menu popup.

Hide Menubar – Supports to hide your Mainmenu Toolbar automatically, you can press the ALT key to show it temporarily.

Personal Menu – With the Personal Menu, you can hide the menus in Menus Toolbar (even the Menus Toolbar), and design your own menu with just few settings.

Menu Editor – Rearrange or remove menuitems from the main context menu (right-click menu) and main menubar (File Edit View etc.)

MenuX – MenuX was designed for laptop/tablet use where maximum screen realestate is desired. Adds the ability to collapse any toolbar.

Have another one that deserves to be on the list? Drop in a comment and let us all know about it.