I remember I spent a long time changing the tooltip on the throbber. Every new version I'd open up one of the jar files to update the tooltip. By the time of this screenshot I had gotten rid of the throbber altogether.
My layout is like his before shot. I use the menubar entries often enough that I want them to be easily accessible - a single "Menu" entry that popped up the other menu items as an overlay menu would be great for me and would allow me to ditch the menubar. As for the status bar - I do like to be able to see the target for links by mousing over them, again this could be an overlay (I think Chrome does that too? perhaps Opera, can't recall).
Among others: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1455
Tiny Menu, your link, disables the shortcut keys according to one review. Thanks though.