Not long now until Ibex is released. However, I ran into this issue again this morning so I thought I’d document the solution for others.

Occasionally when starting Firefox or Thunderbird on Ubuntu (I’m running Hardy Heron 8.04), the window will lose all decoration. No title bar, no minimize, maximize or close buttons and will maximize to fill the window – making it very difficult, if not impossible to move.

In Firefox, this can be easily solved by pressing F11 twice to jump in and out of full screen mode. Thunderbird has no option so we have to work around. Close Thunderbird then edit the following file:

$ nano ~/.mozilla-thunderbird/xyz1234.default/localstore.rdf

Find the following line and edit the attributes to match those shown here:

<rdf:Description
RDF:about="chrome://messenger/content/messenger.xul#messengerWindow"
                         width="800"
                         height="600"
                         sizemode="normal"
                         screenX="5"
                         screenY="5" />

Credit goes to SvenRieke for this workaround.