Loss of my 'drop down' list from Firefox

[Old Sparky]

Earlier today, when I went on line to check for new emails, etc., my dropdown list failed to appear. Not a big problem as I've been gradually reinstating various sites, including this one, as I browse, but I wondered what had caused this to happen.  A couple of evening ago, I noticed that FF had deleted the log-in details from several sites, and I had to re-enter them all.  Could the two things be connected, I wonder.  System here is a HP6200 running W10, and, as noted, my browser is Firefox, which is kept up to date. ON a related topic, I've never carried out a defragmentation on this PC, which I've had for ove two years now. Maybe I should do so?

[ppppenguin]

I've noticed FF losing login details occasionally. Also if you delete all cookies you'll lose a lot of login details.

Defrag rarely needed, normally only if disk is getting very full. If you have a solid state disk then it's harmful as it wastes write cycles.

[Nick]

With modern SSDs, write cycles are not really a problem any more.

It's more that defrag is completely and utterly pointless with an SSD as they work in totally different way to spinning disks - the disk is never "fragmented" with an SSD - it's a meaningless concept with them.

Cookie deletion or general flakiness of FF is the most likely cause.

[radioman]

I've had this as well - normally after an up-date.
If you 'right click' near the top of the screen, make sure that Menu Bar has a tick next to it.

Andy

[Old Sparky]

I've just checked and the Menu Bar does have a tick adjacent to it, Andy. Thanks to Jeffrey & Nick, too, for your explanations. Very helpful. As to what type of HDD this PC has, it may a solid state one. AFAIK it's original. My PC is one of those that were sold by Unreal Dave a couple of years back. BTW it works very well apart from th occasional hiccup such as this one

[Terry]

I think you'll find it's a 500GB HDD.

Why not just tale a peek inside the case?

You can look at the HDD in Windows Explorer - right click on the C: drive and select properties to find out how big it is and how much unused space remains.