04-15-2024 01:12 PM - edited 04-15-2024 01:22 PM
In the latest Nightly Blog post, our product team has announced some exciting work aimed at improving the sidebar experience in Firefox.
To quickly summarize…
We have been exploring (including listening to all your feedback and ideas here on Connect) how to best enhance the existing sidebar and strengthen productivity use cases. You may have even discovered these early concept builds in Nightly behind preferences—good catch 👀!
This is very much at an experimental prototype stage, but we are encouraged by the early positive feedback. And we look forward to engaging with you here for additional feedback once sidebar features are ready for testing.
Stay tuned and feel free to drop any questions or comments below.
04-15-2024 07:35 PM
Will this still be able to work well with things like Tree-Style Tabs and Sidebery? I mean they might need to update APIs or whatever, but should still have the flexibility to work generally the same yeah?
04-22-2024 01:14 PM
Hi!
Yes, we plan to keep supporting existing sidebar API.
Additionally, new sidebar will allow hiding horizontal tabs, so that folks using a variety of extensions and customizations can keep their workflow if they prefer it to native vertical tabs.
04-15-2024 10:16 PM - edited 04-15-2024 11:05 PM
I noticed that in the demo/test build there was the option to pin sites to sidebar, which is great addons. But, if/when implementing that, please implement also the functionality of extensions, userstylus, userscripts, etc, etc.. also work on those spaces (aka, make them to have same privileges as tabs). Many browsers that implement such functionality, such as Microsoft Edge, don't implement this. Which make those pinned sites considerably less useful, sense things such as Dark Mode and your other extensions won't work on it.
Also, sense you guys are working on the sidebar, I'm not sure how feasible would this be, but I think the idea of having multiple sidebars (well, actually more like 2) could be useful. Like, suppose you want to have a sidebar in your left with your browser history opened, and you want to have OTHER sidebar in the right with your bookmarks or a site opened there.
04-22-2024 01:18 PM
Hi! We hope to get to pinned tabs in the sidebar, but this will likely be coming a little down the line precisely for the reasons you mentioned - we want pinned tabs (that would be first and foremost useful to folks who would decide to stick to horizontal tab layout) to have functionality similar to what existing tab strip has. Unfortunately, that's a fairly large engineering lift.
04-16-2024 12:15 AM
That's great.
If there is an opportunity to improve the sidebar, it would be nice to have it:
Auto-hide sidebar function.
The ability to move the History, Bookmarks buttons around.
Ability to add your favorite site to open in the sidebar.
The ability to change the size of the sidebar very subtly.
Ability to have 2 sidebars, for example 1 on the left and 2 on the right
Thank you for listening!
04-22-2024 01:23 PM
Hi Nich!
Thank you for your suggestions! Some of these things are already in progress, others are stretch goals/might come in later releases.
One thing that's not on our radar for now are two sidebars - most of our users report being pressed for space, so we are working on an interaction model that tries to use less rather more screen space.
04-16-2024 06:18 AM
Thanks for the update. Can't wait to hear more!
04-16-2024 07:00 AM
Since I'm planning to improve the sidebar functionality, I'd like to mention some of my requests. There is a function in the sidebar of Edge called Drop, which is to transfer files, videos, text, and pictures between Edges of different devices. I love this feature. If you're going to develop this feature, remember not to throttle the speed
04-16-2024 07:13 AM
I want your sidebar UI to look a little better, I like the chrome style. A good-looking UI is also important to make people more comfortable and enjoyable
04-16-2024 12:29 PM - edited 04-16-2024 12:30 PM
Maybe this is already obvious, but in setting up sidebery by updating my profile css, I wanted to hide the tab bar so only the sidebery tabs show. The same option should exist for the native implementation
04-18-2024 06:00 AM
I think it should work as an option where you want to see the tabs (if at all): top/bottom/left/right/nowhere. In that case, there is no need to turn off the original one. This is how Vivaldi does it:
04-22-2024 01:24 PM
We are planning to support hiding the horizontal tab strip and address this long-standing need.
04-17-2024 05:50 AM - edited 04-17-2024 05:52 AM
I think Browser Arc is the most disruptive in the browser market today. We brought the Safari experience on Mac to Windows. I believe that Mozilla should be inspired by cleaner experiences, and provide users with solutions to create their own experience with "complements" that add this possibility.
04-17-2024 07:20 AM
Great news 👏
04-18-2024 12:42 AM
@Jon Hello, will it be possible to expand the sidebar so that it takes up half of the screen? This feature would be a good starting point for implementing Split View, similar to what's available in Microsoft Edge (or Vivaldi).
04-22-2024 01:29 PM
The new sidebar will be able to expand to 75% of the screen (with an eye for future of the split view and, before that, for the convenience of viewing, say, History in nearly full screen for some use cases)
04-18-2024 09:45 AM
Mozilla can refer to the design of the Floorp browser and the Midori browser, both of which are browsers based on the gecko kernel. But your UI needs to learn from Chrome
04-18-2024 04:26 PM
Chrome has horrible UI, please don't imitate it more than already, in fact imitate it less...
04-20-2024 06:35 AM
But Chrome's UI is really good-looking, and of course everyone's aesthetic is different
04-18-2024 05:09 PM - edited 04-18-2024 05:12 PM
Expanding and contracting the sidebar by clicking on the edge is a good function, but if a user (like me) drags the sidebar whole way to the left side of the window, there is no way to expand the sidebar to become visible again. I have tried closing the window, restarting, but nothing works. Adding a minimum size or a condition for the sidebar size to be reverted would fix this massive issue.
Also: The child tabs when using tree-style tabs appear to not always expand even when the "expand all" button is selected. I obviously can not continue testing this because the above error has locked me out of using sidebar, but making the collapse and expand function of tree-style tabs more reliable also seems necessary.
I am using the Waterfox engine if this has any effect on these issues.
04-22-2024 03:04 PM - edited 04-22-2024 03:05 PM
Hi Corb,
The prototype you're using has lots of known troubles - it's something we put together as a proof-of-concept to motivate longer-term investment into the sidebar improvements, then moved on to working on making it right in Nightly.
We will definitely work on ensuring the stability of the updates to the sidebar and key extensions in Nightly.
As you know, Firefox forks are specialized modifications, so if you keep seeing discrepancies between the fork and the standard Nightly as more sidebar functionality becomes available, I'd suggest filing issues in your fork's repository so that development team can look into the reasons for unexpected behaviors/bugs.
04-18-2024 11:02 PM
Haven't figured out how to use the sidebar in Firefox Nightly yet.
04-18-2024 11:17 PM
Hello
https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/04/15/exploring-improvements-to-the-firefox-sidebar/
Apparently according to
https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/1bpywre/comment/kyl8vwm
about:config, searched for sidebar and set sidebar.revamp to true
Configuration Editor for Firefox
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/about-config-editor-firefox
04-21-2024 08:02 AM
It'd be nice if the sidebar stretched the length of the whole window, like the spaces toolbar does in thunderbird.
Also, I hope the new sidebar is just as extensible as the old one and doesn't make extensions like sideberry impossible.
04-22-2024 03:08 PM
Hi aoeui,
The updated sidebar will remain compatible with existing sidebar-ready extensions. As we make the new functionality available in Nightly, we will kindly ask our community to report any problems with key extensions to us and extension developers so we can collaborate and ensure that everyone's workflows remain uninterrupted.
The new sidebar will stretch to 75% of the screen👍
04-22-2024 03:17 PM
Could you gradually refine this feature to Split View? (at least for 3 tabs in one window maximum)
It would be wow.
04-28-2024 03:27 PM
On that note, it's probably asking too much, but it would be amazing if you could put like 4 different split views, like you can do on browsers such as Vivaldi. It might seem a little bit overblown, but many sites today use responsive design, and you can neatly put them side by side.
04-29-2024 06:34 AM
I think the split view request is more related to this idea : https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/split-screen-tab-in-tab-feature-view-more-than-one-tab-at-once/....
04-30-2024 03:36 AM - edited 05-01-2024 02:50 AM
My view on what the future sidebar can be ( behave and look like ) :
Also to note that stuff could live in other places other than the sidebar, instead being placed on nav bar strip or even status bar ( at top, for straightforward checking and confirmation of underlying URLs for links, actions for mouse gestures and other page in progress actions like loading, downloading, extension and page specific actions and tasks progresses ) .
The status bar at top ( below other top UI like horizontal bars, including bookmark bar, if enabled ) option makes sense, because usually for text, but presumably also for all webpage content, one has the current line of text scrolled at the top of the viewport/"window" for better head and body posture and less eye and body movement from top of viewport where content is being consumed to status ( currently on bottom ) while also having the benefit of more focused workflow and less distraction .
As always, this kind of status bar is possible with JS and CSS mods, allowing placing/relocation/reordering of addons or scripts buttons to, from and within it .
Buttons or extensions/actions that make sense to have in status bar, specially the top one ( I have some/all of them already with custom JS/CSS status bar ) ignore the emoji 😞 :
Find on page at top, ( below top bars/strips and top status bar ), follows a similar logic.
On the topic of hidden top tab bar, I have nav bar mostly displaying page title and window controls , ( when it or it's address bar is not focused or hovered ) in what's called an "oneliner" on /r/FirefoxCSS community . The page title is animated to fade in, making disappear the address/search bar ( at a minimum ). When the nav bar or address/search widget are focused or hovered then the title is animated away and address bar/widget is animated in, with both animations happening simultaneously ( also simultaneously for previous case when nav bar is not focused ). I think it's cool, space and information efficient, makes use of animations instead of abrupt transitions, thereby making clear what's going on .
"Small things" like these make a difference in an user's workflow, productivity ( or stylistic ) preferences, comfort/accessibility, customizability and "wow factor" .