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suddenly no chrome and alt key does not display menus

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  • Last reply by lxvi

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This morning when I woke up my computer, I was presented with a dialog saying that Firefox had crashed. I checked submit crash report and clicked restart. What I got was a big white rectangle. No text, no "chrome", no title bar, no menu, no response from right-click or the alt key or the f11 key. I restarted Vista and kept getting the same thing. After a few more tries, I finally got the "well this is embarrasing" dialog, and went through with the restore, however, there is still no chrome, no tabs, no title bar, and f11 and the alt key still does not work. I can get it to switch tabs by pressing ctrl-tab.

This morning when I woke up my computer, I was presented with a dialog saying that Firefox had crashed. I checked submit crash report and clicked restart. What I got was a big white rectangle. No text, no "chrome", no title bar, no menu, no response from right-click or the alt key or the f11 key. I restarted Vista and kept getting the same thing. After a few more tries, I finally got the "well this is embarrasing" dialog, and went through with the restore, however, there is still no chrome, no tabs, no title bar, and f11 and the alt key still does not work. I can get it to switch tabs by pressing ctrl-tab.

Chosen solution

There is no way for me to get to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.

Pressing F11 or Fn+F11 does nothing.

All that's on the three windows that opened is the content area and depending on how much content, a vertical scroll bar. Hovering near the top does nothing. There is no Windows title bar, no menu bar, no chrome on the sides or bottom that can be dragged to resize, pressing alt+space gives me a menu with only minimize and close enabled, restore, move, size, and maximize are disabled.

I just launched Firefox Safe Mode from All Programs in the Windows start menu and checked 'Reset toolbars and controls' and then 'Make Changes and Restart'. This seemed to get all the missing chrome/menus/toolbars back. A lot of my bookmarks seemed to be missing, but when I shut it down and then launched from the taskbar's quicklaunch as usual, then at least some (possibly all, still checking) of the recently added bookmarks were displayed. History seems to be intact, so I guess I'll be able to manually rebuild my open tabs. As a side note, I used to have a utility called mozbackup (or something), but for some reason, I was unable to find it in my program files and downloads folders :-(

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The Reset Firefox feature can fix many issues by restoring Firefox to its factory default state while saving your essential information. Note: This will cause you to lose any Extensions, Open websites, and some Preferences.

To Reset Firefox do the following:

  1. Go to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.
  2. Click the "Reset Firefox" button.
  3. Firefox will close and reset. After Firefox is done, it will show a window with the information that is imported. Click Finish.
  4. Firefox will open with all factory defaults applied.


Further information can be found in the Refresh Firefox - reset add-ons and settings article.

Did this fix your problems? Please report back to us!

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Make sure that you do not run Firefox in full screen mode (press F11 or Fn + F11 to toggle; Mac: command+Shift+F).

If you are in full screen mode then hover the mouse to the top to make the Navigation Toolbar and Tab bar appear.

Click the Maximize button (top right corner of the Navigation Toolbar) to leave full screen mode or right click empty space on a toolbar and choose "Exit Full Screen Mode" or press the F11 key.

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Chosen Solution

There is no way for me to get to Firefox > Help > Troubleshooting Information.

Pressing F11 or Fn+F11 does nothing.

All that's on the three windows that opened is the content area and depending on how much content, a vertical scroll bar. Hovering near the top does nothing. There is no Windows title bar, no menu bar, no chrome on the sides or bottom that can be dragged to resize, pressing alt+space gives me a menu with only minimize and close enabled, restore, move, size, and maximize are disabled.

I just launched Firefox Safe Mode from All Programs in the Windows start menu and checked 'Reset toolbars and controls' and then 'Make Changes and Restart'. This seemed to get all the missing chrome/menus/toolbars back. A lot of my bookmarks seemed to be missing, but when I shut it down and then launched from the taskbar's quicklaunch as usual, then at least some (possibly all, still checking) of the recently added bookmarks were displayed. History seems to be intact, so I guess I'll be able to manually rebuild my open tabs. As a side note, I used to have a utility called mozbackup (or something), but for some reason, I was unable to find it in my program files and downloads folders :-(

Modified by lxvi