topic Re: Better sidebar in Discussions

Better sidebar

Mozilla2048 — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 12:07:48 GMT

Hello! The new sidebar feature in Firefox is great, but I have some ideas to improve it:

- Make it thinner/compact or resizable. In my opinion it takes a lot of space for just a few icons. I believe resizing it to half its current size wouldn't cause any issues. On the other hand, if some users want a thicker sidebar, then that's fine, so maybe add an option to select wide/medium/thin and compact/normal/comfortable.

- Make it transparent or adapt its color to the current webpage (see attachment).

- If the user chooses to hide it or show it, stop randomly hiding/showing it in the next session and instead remember if it was closed or open and stick to that preference, even in private windows.

- Add more AI assistants (Grok, Venice AI, Copilot, LLaMA, Duck.ai, DeepSeek, DeepAI and more) and add an option to share the contents of the current webpage with it (example: "please summarize the long Wikipedia page I'm currently viewing" or "hey look, which link should I click?")

- Add more general buttons (examples: search in this page, extensions, passwords, clear recent browsing data, downloads, page source...) and allow moving buttons (example: make it possible to have the AI assistant below the bookmarks). Currently, to move the buttons you have to uncheck a button in the sidebar settings, and then check it again to make it appear at the bottom. Which is not very intuitive and also not possible for the extensions (you can't uncheck an extension button).

Firefox sidebar Green sidebar

Re: Better sidebar

Mozilla2048 — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 13:11:39 GMT

I noticed a new thing: if your sidebar is hidden and you hit Ctrl+B, the bookmarks will appear, along with the sidebar at the left. When you close the bookmarks using the "X" or by hitting Ctrl+B again, the little sidebar remains! You have to do Ctrl+Alt+Z to close it. Now suppose your side bar is hidden and you do Ctrl+B, then Ctrl+Alt+Z to close both the bookmarks and the sidebar. Seems like it solves the problem. But the next time you open the sidebar (Ctrl+Alt+Z or sidebar button), you'll see your bookmarks again instead of just the sidebar. Annoying.

Re: Better sidebar

siffemcon — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 20:59:43 GMT

If you already haven't, you should also post that at https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/idb-p/ideas. The sidebar visibility thing is a resolved bug, should land in Release version soon.

Re: Better sidebar

Mozilla2048 — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 21:05:56 GMT

But I did! -- I thought I did. I submitted this as an Idea, but it randomly landed into the Discussions. So I don't know if I should repost it. Don't ask me why, the exact same thing happened to Enhance the translation feature in the Firefox address bar.

Re: Better sidebar

siffemcon — Thu, 03 Jul 2025 21:15:57 GMT

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Don't really know how items are assinged.