To turn toolbars on and off you can either:

• right-click a blank area of the tab bar
• right-click the "+" button on the tab bar
• View menu > Toolbars (if you aren't display the classic menu bar, tap the Alt key first to display it temporarily)

You'll want to turn on the Navigation Toolbar.

There's a hidden setting for new tabs:

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the search box above the list, type or paste newtab and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click the browser.newtab.url preference and enter your preferred page:

• Page thumbnails (default) => about:newtab
• Blank tab => about:blank
• Built-in Firefox home page => about:home
• Any other page => full URL to the page

Press Ctrl+t to open a new tab and verify that it worked. Fixed?

If Firefox ignores the setting, one of your extensions may be overriding it. Try disabling ALL nonessential or unrecognized extensions on the Add-ons page. Either:

• Ctrl+Shift+a
• orange Firefox button (or Tools menu) > Add-ons

In the left column, click Extensions. Then, if in doubt, disable.

Usually a link will appear above at least one disabled extension to restart Firefox. You can complete your work on the tab and click one of the links as the last step.

Does that fix it?

You get the orange Firefox menu button when the menu bar is hidden.

• Firefox menu button > Options
• View > Toolbars (press F10 to display the menu bar)
• Right-click empty toolbar area

See also:

• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/how-do-i-get-firefox-button
• https://support.mozilla.org/kb/Menu+bar+is+missing