Before, after the first time they moved them to the top, there was an easily accessible option to move them back down to the bottom, and many of us took advantage of it (and haven’t had to think about the matter since). It is that option that has now been removed, and can only be restored with the extension linked by BigT in the OP.
I appreciate that there are people who want to be able to control things like that (including ‘skinning’ application windows). I’m just not one of their number.
Oddly, I think I’m becoming less agitated by change as I get older.
Not writing this on a tablet – this is a desktop, with FF 3.6.28
At work, most of the users have given up on FF (ESR) and are using Chrome. I’ll ask around and see if there is a reason – I’ll be surprised if it’s because they like the UI so much better.
I’ve just spent half an hour trying to get my Firefox back the way I liked it. I had to add not only the Classic Theme Restorer, but the Classic Toolbar Buttons. I don’t know if that was responsible, but when I look in “Customize…” now there are three bookmarks buttons. One is the new one with more functions than anybody needs, one is the dropdown menu only, and the third opens the bookmark list in the sidebar. I suggest you add all three to your toolbar and test them to see which is which, and delete the two you don’t want.
Woot! Thanks very much, GuanoLad, that fixed me right up.
For anyone who misses their toolbar button to directly open the bookmarks sidebar, that does it.
- Install Classic Toolbar Buttons
- Open the hamburger menu, choose Customize
- Look for the “Bookmarks” star in the left side, in the Additional Tools and Features section.
Drag it onto your toolbar and rejoice. If you have multiple ones, keep trying them until you find the right one.
Oh, so that’s why it stopped working. I was wondering why all my pounding on the esc key has been fruitless.
Here it is, Saturday, and mine still looks the same as always. Am I doing something wrong?
Updated.
No issues (thus far).
You need to tell it to update unless you have it set to update automatically.
I just updated mine and it looks a little different but performs exactly the same. I’m not a power user though.
This doesn’t work for me. 
All that Classic Toolbar Buttons seems to do is to make all the toolbar icons look like buttons, which is not something I much care about. It does not give me any new items in “customize”. In particular, the only bookmark icon it gives me is the one that arrived with the “upgrade”, and that either creates a bookmark for the current page or gives a drop-down menu. (I removed this from the toolbar as worse than useless.) There is nothing else there, and, in particular, nothing that will give me a button to open the sidebar like I want (and used to have).
If anyone has any further suggestions about fixing this, I’d like to hear.
Well that happened months ago. You mean you have been pounding at the escape key ever since? I know of two extensions that currently work to restore a “stop gif animations” function. “Active Stop Button” gives an icon in the location bar (that worked for a while, then stopped working, but has worked again since the last two or three weeks), and “SuperStop” which stops them with a Shift-Esc combination.
Personally I also use “Flashblock” to prevent unwanted Flash animations, which are a whole different source of annoyance.
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Oh, and I have now noticed yet another quite important UI item that v. 29 seems to have removed. :mad: I have no throbber on the toolbar anymore, so I can no longer easily tell whether a page is still trying to finish loading, or has given up. Does anyone know a way to get the throbber back?
OK, I take that back. :o I found the “Star” icon hiding on the left side of the new “customize” page, dragged it to the right, and then onto the toolbar, and it gave me back my bookmark sidebar icon. 
Classic Toolbar Buttons really made the Nautipolis theme, that I had been using, look very ugly, but it seems OK with other themes, so I can live with it.
I still want my toolbar throbber back, though.
In your “Add-Ons” list, find “Classic Toolbar Buttons” and choose “Options.” Uncheck everything, and then change the “Navigation Toolbar Buttons” to “Disabled.”
That way the graphic interface look is unaltered, but teh additional buttons are still available under “Customize.”
Not relentlessly. I just tapped it a couple of times, noticed it wasn’t working, and scrolled down past the flashy animated annoyance. It’s irritating, but not so much that I went on a quest to find out why it quit working.
Is that because I was lucky, or smart?
Thank you for this thread. My FF just updated to 29.0 but, thanks to this thread, I was able to restore some sanity within about 10 minutes.
I finally caved and updated tonight. Thank you SO much for this. At first, it messed things up even worse than the update, but I played with it and got it mostly back how it was. For some reason my toolbar buttons are tiny now, but I can deal. It doesn’t play well with Colorful Tabs, and its own color randomizer isn’t as good as CT, but I can live with it if the compatibility doesn’t get fixed.
I even started looking for new toolbar buttons and found another “new tab” add on button that I got to install. It’s been bugging me for YEARS now. You used to be able to have the “new tab” next to the tabs AND as a toolbar button. Then one of their brainiac updates allowed you to have ONE and ONLY ONE. I chose keeping it on my toolbar because I used that one more often, but sometimes I do like the one next to the rest of the tabs on the right. So now I have two installed, one each where I want them. I don’t care if it’s duplication. It’s muscle memory. That’s part of why I hate change.
But I’m not entirely adverse to change. While I was getting it to look exactly how it looked in the old version, I decided to move some things around and it looks very different for me than it ever has before. I kind of like it better, other than my buttons are itty bitty. So it’s not change I hate, but stupid, pointless, hard to fix change.
I like my tabs right above my window. While it’s only a tiny bit of space, it makes it easier for me to navigate between tabs. I don’t use the address bar much, so that can go way up at the top the furthest away from where my cursor normally is. It’s not being “stuck” on some old config, but it’s sensical and time-saving. Yeah, it might be just an inch difference, but multiply that by how many times I would move and it adds up to a huge carpal-tunneling difference.
Maybe we could get a few of the geeky Dopers together to write a Straight Dope Internet Navigator? After all, nobody knows the Dope like Dopers. It’d use XULRunner with Webkit to look like Firefox 2 and perform like Chrome 87 (with a fake IE skin so your parents can use it too). Auto ad blocking, JavaScript/Flash/images/colors disabled by default, built-in Let Me Google That For You.com support, and a 3-month reminder to renew your Charter Membership. Every post would have mandatory spell check, and three errors in one post will suspend your posting privileges until you complete a vocab lesson. All your Gmail will be displayed on a built-in HTML5 Pine client, and every HTTP error will automatically shoot an email to the site’s webmaster and start a new complaint in MPSIMS. And lastly, every time we update the interface, it’ll first put up a IMHO poll and pre-fill vetoes from the first 5,000 user IDs. The perfect blend of new and old tech!
Thanks for this BigT!
Is there a comprehensive list to undo all the bullshit back to the stock look?
My tabs are all fucked up; no longer small icons with a couple letters of text but a larger, single favicon. Fuckers.
And where did the hyperlink text go? When I hovered over a link I’d see its target down on my (now-recovered) status bar, but now it’s not showing up there. I’m not clicking Jack or shit (and Jack is on the AoD IMDB page) without knowing where it’s leading to, but I can’t tell. Fuckers.
This is change for change sake bullshit. I hope whoever decided that this ‘update’ to the look/feel was necessary gets a gangrenous uvula from sucking on the MS Ribbon.
My work browser finally updated today. I took one look at it and downloaded the Classic Theme Restorer. It’s still hideous, but not as.
I turned off updating on my home browser. Now that I’ve seen the newest…ahem…“update” I think that was the best decision.
I’ll tell you what I don’t like about tabs-on-top: The stupid file-folder-tab shape at the top of the browser window takes up as much real estate as the location bar, and I never, ever use tabs. Although I have tabs turned off, there is no getting away from that tab-shaped window.
Honestly, I think when it’s time for a given software provider to spit out an update they sort of feel obligated to make design/function changes to make it seem like more of an event. You know, like you can’t announce the advent of “Browser 9.2” and then have it look and act exactly the same. Maybe they even do it so that they can tell at a glance whether a given machine is running the latest software.
But I certainly don’t think it’s because they asked a bunch of users what they want.
Speaking of the new firefox, I started another thread a few days ago about the disappearing “forward” button. Fellow dopers there informed me that it disappears when there is no place to go “forward” to; I accepted this explanation because, after I tried a few back-and-forth functions, that seemed to be what was going on.
HOWEVER, in the days following it has happened several times now that the browser has simply forgotten some page I’ve been on, used the back button to click away from, and then wanted to go (forward) back to. This is really, really annoying. It never happened before, and I don’t understand why simply hiding a button instead of graying it out would result in this behavior.