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. 

[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.