How to disable global menu and have always visible menu bars

Is it possible to get menus to be shown in always visible menu bars in 14.04, rather than in window title bars?

Yes, you should remove some packages. Use:

sudo apt-get remove --purge appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt firefox-globalmenu thunderbird-globalmenu indicator-appmenu

This will restore application menus in right place.

UPD: there might be a few packages I missed. To find them, open Synaptic and in the search field enter "appmenu", check the found packages for removal, then search for "globalmenu" and remove them too.

Restart/relogin into your X session to finish changes.

Also check this article.