JAB, I find it humorous that when the issue of Firefox's "minimalism" is addressed by the people here, you have no reply except to say that the usefulness of the Compact Menu extension is overshadowed by the lack of instant and easy access to the features.
The features that appear in the menus are the features that the average user would in fact need on the browser. MoCo works from the lowest common denominator, but assumes that its customers are reasonably intelligent beings. You sir seem to think your customers are idiots, as you feel you have to DUMB DOWN THE INTERFACE for their benefit.
What is minimalism? According to Answers.com,
minimalism has three definitions. Only the second one interests me for this discussion. Minimalism is defined as "use of the fewest and barest essentials or elements, as in the arts, literature, or design." Your design as shown below does not qualify for minimalist, because it doesn't use the "fewest and barest essentials".
Let's compare.
Here's yours.
Here's mine.
I really don't see how yours adheres to the definition of minimalism. You have mentioned that you speak of "unusable minimalism", or a minimalism that is not fit for use. Therein lies the problem. I consider your setup to be neither usable nor minimalist, and therefore I'm not seeing the point here. The average Firefox user has tooltips for the buttons, and menus for access to commonly used features. Features that an advanced user may want to access but an average user may not bother with are not as easily seen, likely put away in the options. Tech savvy users have about:config to use if they want to further customize the browser, OR they can tinker with the underlying code themselves.
My parents, my brother-in-law, my roommate, and my brother all have no problem with Firefox. None of them are anywhere near tech savvy like myself. Yet all of them seem to be able to use the browser without any problems. Why is that? Because only the essential features are readily available at the surface level of the browser, in keeping with the minimalist approach of Firefox.
Mind you, I haven't touched on the subject of extensions, except for the Compact Menu extension, which I happen to quite like for the reasons noted above. The entire thing that is annoying people here is that you keep on trying to pass off your setup as the only logical setup, and are failing to see that other people out there who are as well informed as you are do not see it your way. You already know I don't see it your way, as my setup in this post quite blatantly shows.
At this point, anything else I would say here would be echoing what others have said, though I'd not be nearly as nice about it.
There is a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
