This has happened to me a few times now. I’ll be messing around with Firefox toolbars, or with an extension, add-ons, or something. Next thing I know, one or all of my toolbars will disappear.

I keep my toolbars hidden when I’m not using them, except the main navigation toolbar. Minimalism is good. I’m not talking about hidden, I mean they’re gone – broken – nothing there but a dead strip of gray space where the toolbar is supposed to be.

If you’re fiddling with customizations, you probably know that you can turn them off and on, hide them, etc.  That’s the basic first step to check, found in most usergroups. It won’t work because we’re talking about fubar toolbar, not accidentally hidden. But just so you know:

Right click on an open area of a toolbar and you’ll see a list of toolbars you can click.

If you can see your menu bar (File, Edit, etc.), click View > Toolbars, and there’s the list.

If you can’t see your menu bar, press Alt.

But what if you can’t see your Navigation Bar, for example, and Firefox won’t turn it back on for you?

Go to View > Toolbars > Customize, and press the Restore Default Set button.

That should get things back to normal. It may also be necessary to restart Firefox. This will not save your toolbar customizations, but they’re gone by now anyway.

Firefox is great for letting us customize things, in ways that are far superior to Internets Exploder or Chrome. But letting us do it doesn’t mean Firefox always has to like it.

Bonus Tips

I mentioned you might not be able to see the menu bar. By default, the menu bar is always visible in Firefox; you can’t hide it. But there’s an add-on available that lets you do exactly that.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4762

Cool!

As in most Windows programs, in Firefox F11 = full screen, Esc to return to normal.