Little idea for the new Firefox theme

Figure 1: Next Firefox theme.

I'm following with great interest what people at Mozilla UX Team is doing in this period about the new Firefox theme, and I find it a really great work!

Anyway, I'd like to suggest a little enhancement (in my opinion) for the GUI, which I think could improve the user experience.

Figure 2: Current Firefox theme.

My idea is to change the behavior of current drop-down buttons. Currently drop-down buttons and menus are rendered with a separation between the button itself and the drop panel, like in figure 1 and figure 2 (you could see this behavior in current Firefox 3.6 version and in the next one, 4.0).

The coherence could be enhanced if these two elements are merged into a single, continuos one.

Here's a draft of what I mean:

Figure 3: Continuos, drop-down button.

When the user clicks on the bookmarks button, the drop-down is merged with the button itself, possibly with the same look. This way the user knows that everything is related.

The same could be applied to the new download button:

Figure 4: Download manager drop-down, with two different looks.

By the way, I really like the new download manager approach, using a number and a global progress bar on the button indicating the current total number of downloads and the global progress of these ones. (Ok, I made a mistake in the draft because the button shows "1" with no current download, so if I have understood well in this case, with no downloads in progress, it should show no number..)

Maybe also other features, like notifications, could behave the same, but they could have a different meaning...

Just to mention it, also Microsoft in the .NET framework uses this approach (if I'm not wrong):

Figure 5: .NET menu style.

I don't know if my thought is good or not, or useful or achievable, but hope it could help in any way...