I always turn on the menu bar on the desktop. Screen real estate is valuable, but using some on a menu bar is a very worthwhile expenditure, in my opinion.
I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.
I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for? I ask because I literally can't remember the last time I did in Firefox; everything's a keyboard shortcut. Fullscreen is F11, inspector is F12, refresh is F5 (even go-to-URL-bar is F6).
> I'm super curious--how often do you actually use the menu and what do you use it for?
I use the menu really frequently -- for pretty much anything that isn't a toolbar button.
I tend not to use keyboard shortcuts generally, but particularly if I'm just reading a website -- in that situation, my hands are on the mouse, not the keyboard, and moving to the keyboard to type a shortcut is more inconvenient than just being able to use two clicks on a menu.
I pull down the History menu reasonably often. I'm one of the few people who still uses bookmarks too. I found that hitting alt was annoying and I'd forget about the menu and try to find stuff on the Hamburger menu instead and get annoyed.
Now that you mention it, I also use the history menu pretty frequently. I don't use the bookmark facility in browsers, though, because I run my own bookmark server (so I have access to my bookmarks no matter what computer or browser I'm using).
Maybe you know this already, but Firefox has shortcuts for both of those. History is Ctrl+H and bookmarks is Ctrl+B. Ctrl+Shift+H and Ctrl+Shift+B to get them in a separate window.
The Ctrl-H history opens up the annoying sidebar though, and then you have to click to expand. It's not as ergonomic as the menu. The Bookmarks have the same problem.
I know about the "Alt" key, but I find the need to press that to pop up the menu to be incredibly annoying.