Firefox has hidden my bookmarks

Something happened with Firefox this evening. I had three tabs open and I was looking at a picture in a 4th tab that was bigger than my screen. But instead of scrolling up and down when I rolled my mouse wheel, it was going left and right. I couldn't scroll up and down at all. Tried to change tabs but they wouldn't open. I was stuck to that one page.

Closed the Firefox browser, opened it back up and instead of opening it full screen, it opened up about one quarter size with some sort of message that Firefox might need to be refreshed. Closed that and reopened and it was the same thing so I went ahead and refreshed it. But again it would not respond when trying to click on another tab. Shut down the computer and restarted and when it came up I restored a previous session and now I could click on tabs again.

However the big problem is now Firefox has hidden my bookmarks. Previously I could click on that library symbol in the toolbar and all of my bookmarks were there. Now clicking on that symbol shows "bookmarks" with a star and a left arrow, "history" with a left arrow, and "downloads". If I click on that "bookmarks" all it shows is recent bookmarks or roughly one third of all my bookmarks. I can go down to the bottom and click "manage bookmarks" then "bookmark menu" and all of them are there. So I need to figure out how to get all of my bookmarks back under that library symbol and get rid of those three sub menus.

This whole incident was strange. Whatever caused the not being able to scroll up and down on Firefox also caused it on Chrome. Also my bigger bold text disappeared from the tabs and file explorer.

Firefox version is 88.

Windows version is 2004 Build 19041.985

I can only address the library button behaviour: I have never used it, but now see that it does, as you have found, only show recent bookmarks. If it ever behaved differently I wouldn't know. I did search for help on how to modify what the library button offers up, and found references to 'bookmarking tools' on the bottom of this page:
Eliminate "Recently Bookmarked" and show the "Other Bookmarks" bookmarks in the sequence I want | Firefox Support Forum | Mozilla Support
But I can find no such option when I try to reproduce the suggested action. Since a list of only recent bookmarks is no use to me, I decided I will hide the library button - and in its place add the 'bookmarks' one, which does at least open up my complete list of bookmarks, as shown here:


Note that I usually have the FF menu showing, so access bookmarks from that. I also often use the bookmarks sidebar, and have just discovered that icon to the right of the 'library' one does just that - it toggles whichever sidebar (bookmarks, history, synced tabs) was most recently used. Live & learn!

I did find references elsewhere to using css files to tweak the menus, but that is a step too far for me.

hth, Martin

Thanks so much you guys. The problem was that whatever happened when Firefox freaked out it deleted that star with the underscore icon. Once I put that back up there like you all suggested, all of the bookmarks were restored.