Firefox provides the option to hide the menu bar and move its menu items to a single menu that is situated next to the tab bar. Right now this is disabled by default in Fedora. All the browsers nowadays try to reduce the vertical footprint of their chrome. This gives maximum space to web pages. It is why Chrome has a button menu instead of a menu bar, and why Firefox on Windows uses a single button attached to the top of the window. Hiding the menu bar in Fedora would have the same effect - it would give more room to web pages, would look nicer, and would actually be easier to use (see how other GNOME applications are moving away from menu bars using a similar approach). I suspect that the reason Firefox doesn't hide the menu bar by default under Linux is because Ubuntu relocates the menubar to the top panel under Unity. Since that isn't possible in GNOME 3, this change seems like a reasonable adjustment.
This change is requested only for Rawhide (Fedora 21), right? I guess the hidden menu bar it primary aimed for gnome-shell, but have you tested this style with other WM? This change should not break the other desktops shipped in Fedora. Also Jan told me there was some difference in style between Windows and Linux when the menu bar is hidden, but he's on PTO this week.
I was partially involved with Unity integration, Canonical is more than happy to modify the FF package to integrate it nicely, so they don't really care whether the menubar is hidden or not from the default package, if they don't care we shouldn't care either. The hidden menu bar is not just a GNOME Shell matter I'd say it should be the preferred way in any desktop (as it is in Windows and Mac). The main issue with it is vertical pixels being wasted in a world where most screens are wide, in a 1280x800 screen, those 80 pixels do make a difference no matter what desktop you are using.
We're going to track it also on upstream: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=896887
(In reply to Martin Stransky from comment #1) > This change is requested only for Rawhide (Fedora 21), right? No, we're targetting F20.
This bug will be fixed by Firefox UX release (project australis). See upstream bug for details.
\o/ Good job guys!
Excellent news! I'm excited about this.