Improvements to the Firefox sidebar are on the way…

[Jon]

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. 

[tilwiti]

We definitely need a meeting with the UX team; hopefully, someone will respond soon.

I've suggested this here, but it seems my proposal got lost in the forum's overall flow: https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/discussions/let-s-organize-q-amp-a-session-with-ux-team/td-p/55936

Please support this suggestion on Reddit, as my account keeps getting placed in read-only mode.

I think this will resolve a lot of issues 😀

[tilwiti]

https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/s/Vco55cu17H

[silvajohni]

It sounds great.

[silvajohni]

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

[asafko]

Hi folks,

A few quick updates from the sidebar team:

- you might have already seen a thread on thread from the Firefox team on a variety of exciting updates we have in the works, but dropping the link here just in case,

- on the sidebar side of things, we are making progress on the vertical tabs and improvements to the history and synced tabs views that already exist in the sidebar. We're going to start sharing demos and invite the community to join testing the new feature set once it's a little less rough around the edges.

[avijayr]

i would love to test the vertical sidebar out as and when you release into the nightly builds! Very excited to hear this movement after such a long time!

[Agentvirtuel]

 Hello

---

ikpjr wrote:

Weather info

---

For information purposes
Take a look at https://www.camp-firefox.de/forum/thema/137932-wetterangaben-firefox-startseite
Clarification : To avoid displaying my actual geolocation, i use a vpn
https://www.youtube.com/embed/4einVxdxvzQ

[DrBolero]

I would like to see the Bookmarks Sidebar work the same way as Manage Bookmarks. For example, Manage Bookmarks allows selecting multiple bookmarks (e.g., Shft-select or Ctrl-select), but the Bookmarks Sidebar only allows selecting one bookmark or folder at a time. I often have Manage Bookmarks and Bookmarks Sidebar open at the same time to facilitate moving bookmarks (singular or in groups) from one folder to another without having to scroll or cut & paste. This is only one example of the differences.

[cluxter]

It would be awesome to be able to detach the sidebar in order to have it on any screen. This way we could have one dedicated screen for tabs management, or it would allow people using a tiling window manager like i3 to have the sidebar exactly where they want it to be on their screen.

Why would I want to put it on another screen? Because I could have a vertical screen to see all my tabs in the vertical sidebar, and my other horizontal screens to work. I tried that with Sidebery just to see how it would look, and it's actually amazing because:

• you see way more tabs;
• it separates tabs management from actual browsing, it's better for your mental organization;
• you enjoy your full horizontal screen(s) for browsing.

Is this something that is already considered, and if it's not, is this something that could be considered in the future?

EDIT: it would be even better to be able to have several sidebars, so I could have one sidebar per profile, or per tab container, each on a dedicated screen. This would be so great for tab management.

[Maverick74]

Really GREAT news!!!

I have a question, however: What about the rest of Library?

Would be great to have the entire Library available on the sidebar (see: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1420403 )

Will we have that as well?

( At least let us get about:downloads on the sidebar...)

[dom]

Consider me a bit biased, but Sidebery along with this userchrome is a really great trade-off between having an unobtrusive tab interface along with behavior a user would predict of their tabs. Other vertical tab implementations (Edge, Floorp, Vivaldi) with expanding sidebars tend to be cumbersome to use due to animation speeds and whatnot

Particularly of note here is:

- the separation of the tabs column and the pinned tabs (other sidebar apps could potentially be accessed beneath the pinned tabs)

- the (animated & fast) hovering expansion of the sidebar and its contents.

- Easily accessible tab utilities along the bottom (new tab, history, settings, bookmarks)

Thank you for considering these ux tidbits 🙂

[aminought]

I really hope that you will add web panels (aka pinned tabs) to the sidebar and make it possible to open them without closing Tree Style Tab / Sideberry. For me now, this feature in Floorp is a killer feature. To be honest, I don't really know how to do this without a second sidebar, but it seems convenient to me to have tree-style vertical tabs on the left, and bookmarks, history, downloads and web panels on the right. I see two options:

1. Implement native tree-style vertical tabs that will be located on the left and the sidebar on the right, then I will be just happy.
2. Make it possible to pin Tree Style Tab to the sidebar, and display the rest as an overlay.

[asafko]

Hi folks,

Thank you so much for all the thoughtful feedback and ideas.

Many of the things you are asking for are on our backlog or "wish list" (we would like to work on it, but it's not a part of the roadmap yet).

We are currently working on the foundational pieces that will pave the way for more complex functionality in the sidebar. For instance, we want to provide options for the sidebar to be displayed or expanded on hover. However, doing this without compromising performance will take some time, so we're pushing this work past the first version.

In any case, we want to share what we're working on with you and we put together a brief video showing the basics of the interaction model over here. We know that no model will perfectly fit everyone's workflow, but this current version is based on extensive user testing, quantitative data, and the feedback from the community here, SUMO, and Bugzilla we had at the time we started. We will tweak it along the way, taking your feedback into account and guided by how most folks will use it in release. We want to provide a reasonable number of customization options, but keep in mind we're a small group working on this fairly large chunk of functionality.

Couple of notes:

• the video has closed captions enabled, and they are handy, as we were having some troubles during the recording,
• I made a verbal "typo" at 4:25, calling the horizontal tab strip a horizontal sidebar. 🙂 I meant disabling the horizontal tab strip, of course, and the video shows the correct control in the Customize sidebar panel.
• what I'm showing is not the final visual design. The final design will be polished along the way.
  
  We'll be in touch once Nightly is in shape and ready for peeking and testing, but we're reading your feedback and doing our best to deliver a solid first version. However, it's to be expected we will not be able to fit the perfect sidebar of our dreams into the first release, and we'll be improving and enhancing it for a good bit after the first version is available. Hopeful for your support, patience, and willingness to work with us as we make it more useful and helpful for you.

[aminought]

Thank you for sharing your progress! I doubt you'll listen to what I have to say, but I have a few suggestions.

1. Instead of the sidebar settings button, I expect to see a Firefox settings button like in Vivaldi or Floorp. And the sidebar settings button can be moved to the context menu.
2. I need web panels (something like pinned tabs, but opening directly in the sidebar). Moreover, these web panels should not be unloaded from memory when they are closed. Now I miss it the most after switching from Vivaldi. I see that work is underway in many areas, but I can get vertical tabs or tab grouping using Sidebery, but only you can add web panels.
3. I really want to be able to open several panels at the same time, for example Sidebery and bookmarks.
4. Will it be possible to add your own elements to the sidebar via Customize Toolbar?

[xUxSxExR]

the settings allows to open the firefox settings, but with an extra click.

I agree a right click menu is needed.

Also moving anything there, and drag-dropping in the "customize toolbar" menu, which should be made more accessible.

[Octuris]

Hello! I just wanted to say that the Figma model for the sidebar looks amazing and has everything I would want from a baseline vertical tabs functionality. One thing I would hope to see is the ability to have the vertical tabs on one side, and the sidebar panel itself on the other. In the case where the vertical tabs pane is expanded and the sidebar panel (history for example) is open at the same time, it seems better that the web content be sandwiched between the two rather than both panels pushing the content all the way to one side.

Here's an example from my custom configuration:

Thanks for all your work!

[Blisterexe]

the feature looks awesome so far, i don't really have any feedback for the vertical tabs that haven't already been mentioned, but for the sidebar itself, id like to see is the possibility to put any button on the sidebar (the way you currently can with the tab bar) and/or the option to open any website in the sidebar view (the one that certain extensions and the history can use).

Ill probably come back and give feedback once the feature lands in nightly.

[xUxSxExR]

funny enough, that website does not work on FF android or on FF Nightly on Linux. Autoplay does not work, the video is duplicate, no audio...

[dom]

Thank you for this update! I appreciate your community-oriented approach and the preliminary designs are looking really nice - it's good to see that you are considering native support of plugins like Sidebery and TST!

Aside from my feedback from earlier RE: the responsive collapsible sidebar - one thing I wanted to mention in response to your cross-referencing portion of the video is split tabs - Vivaldi has a great implementation of this, and Floorp has one too, which could give the engineers an idea of how this could look in practice since it is open source.

source: https://medium.com/@meymigrou/how-i-use-vivaldi-browser-to-organize-my-workflow-7a4b42c1c64c

Floorp:

Floorp in particular (as im sure the community has not let you forget) is probably the best example of the sorts of UX a lot of us are looking for (aside from the sidebar expansion being so slow D:). I'd be willing to bet they'd be very open to collaborating and sharing their knowledge and even their work upstream if you find its quality acceptable.

Thanks for listening and best of luck!

[roland5]

By modifying the CSS I currently have fully hidden tabs at the top of the browser. I use sidebery to have tabs on the side. It's more convenient for me because it's easier for me to see the names of the cards, and I'm blind as a bat.

• I have to hover my mouse over the left edge of the screen to make the vertical tabs panel show up - it doesn't move the website content, but overlap it. I think that even a minimal bar with icons on the side would be a waste of space (for me). If I don't hover mouse over the left edge, it is fully hidden. If I want to quickly check the status of tabs (where exactly I'm right now) or I don't want to move the mouse over the left edge, I set up button shortcut in sidebery, that shows me the tab panel for as long as I hold it.
• I'm not interested in the grid view. If it can be turned off, that's fine.
• I am interested in creating a tabs tree - the main topic and the possibility of nesting sub-topics and possibly subsequent topics within them.
• I'm also interested in the ability to create groups of cards without nesting cards.
• It would be nice to combine the tabs tree and groups together.
• A useful function of sidebery is the coloring of tabs - I have immunology set to blue, parasitology to green, and immunoparasitology to purple etc. - with my poor eyesight, it makes navigating through the tabs much faster.

What you showed looks fine to me. I don't mind starting with basic functionality and adding new things over time.

[xUxSxExR]

your "spam flood" detection does not work, when I list the wished buttons (Like addons settings, overview and individual entries) but with the word "A d d o n" multiple times I cannot send it.

[jcpaclapp]

Will do,