Sidebar and vertical tabs: release channel experimentation

[asafko]

Hi folks, 

Over the next couple of months, we will be testing an updated sidebar, its tools, and vertical tabs in the release version of Firefox (remember, a while back, we asked you to try it out in Nightly 131, and we appreciated your feedback and encouragement in this Connect thread). If you are using the release version, you might get early access to these features and get a nudge to try them out.

Only a portion of users in Firefox releases 133 and 134 will see this experience, helping us evaluate and improve the features. If you’re part of the experiment, we’d love for you to try this early version and share your thoughts. 

We’re also working on many improvements you’ve requested, including: 

• Easier ways to close tabs in the collapsed sidebar.
• Expanding the sidebar on hover.
• Reducing space used by tools in the expanded sidebar.
• Visually and functionally polishing the sidebar tools panels and browser layout in the vertical tabs mode. 

As usual, we appreciate your patience as we iron out the rough spots in the experience. If you’re not ready to engage with these new features, you can disable them in the sidebar settings or opt out from the experiment via about:studies.

If you are are having trouble figuring out how to disable the sidebar, please follow these steps:

1. Locate the gear icon with the Customize sidebar label at the bottom of the sidebar and click on it.

2. Set the Sidebar button setting to Show and hide sidebar.

3. Click the sidebar button in the toolbar to hide the sidebar (it is highlighted in the second screenshot).

4. Right-click the sidebar icon and choose the Remove from toolbar option.

Set Sidebar button setting to "Show and hide sidebar"Click the sidebar button in the toolbar to hide the sidebarRight click the sidebar icon choose "Remove from toolbar" option.

If you have already removed the sidebar button from the toolbar and are stuck with the sidebar visible, but no toolbar button to close it:

1. Right-click the toolbar and choose the Customize toolbar option.

2. Drag the sidebar icon back to the toolbar and click Done in the lower right corner.

3. Once the sidebar button is back in your toolbar, click it to close the sidebar.

4. Right-click the sidebar icon and choose the Remove from toolbar option.

Sidebar expanded with no sidebar button visibleReturn the sidebar button via Customize toolbarClose the sidebar, right-click the sidebar button and remove it.

 

[wutongtaiwan]

I want a feature to pin the identity tab to the sidebar. I use the "Private" identity tab when I open a website, and I want to be able to access this tab more quickly, so I need this feature

[nixiemc]

I am the same person as "nixieff," who appears very rarely on Mozilla Support's community forums. I was one of a lucky few users to be on-boarded onto the new sidebar via Firefox 133. I have two questions at this time (perhaps I will have more later; we'll see where we go from here).

1. When viewing your history in the old sidebar, you have options to organise your history by date, site, date and site, most visited, and last visited. However, when viewing your history in the new sidebar, you are only able to organise your history by date and site. Why is this the case? (I have a conflict of interest because I've organised my history by last visited for around a decade and am disappointed to see this option be removed with the new update.)

2. I believe that the sidebar has been introduced to facilitate the new AI Chatbot tool (because the Firefox Support page about the sidebar - https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-firefox-sidebar-access-bookmarks-history-synced - now tells people to go to an article entitled "Enable AI chatbots in Firefox" to learn more about the new sidebar). However, this implies completely redesigning the sidebar to make way for a single button. Is there any reason why AI Chatbots cannot instead be accessed from the toolbar at the top of the screen? (It could drop down from the toolbar onto the page, like clicking the Pocket or Library buttons do.)

[vinny1]

Hello. I would to share some thoughts on my usage of the sidebar feature:

There's a maximum space set for the pinned tabs but maybe we could have an option to adjust that or let the tabs just take their regular space without the need for a scrollbar, with just the Separator indicating which tabs are pinned or not.

[asafko]

We're working on making sure you can "pull" the separator down, so you can decide for yourself how much space pinned tabs should occupy, but it will take some time to get that to the release channel.

[bp4prez]

I really like the addition of vertical tabs. Is there a way to expand the vertical tabs to see titles via keyboard shortcut?

[asafko]

Thank you!

We're currently looking for one here and if we can find a not-yet-used-one, we'll make it happen.

[rv]

Maybe better to put that effort in make keyboard-shortcuts user-editable?

Kind regards and thanks a lot! ❤️

[Nomutile]

Thanks.  I ?think? the problem somehow self-corrected after I logged in to Mozilla in order to be able to post my original comment -- because after my comment appeared and I returned to my home screen, the horizontal tab bar had been restored. 

Maybe in the future I will find a use for the vertical sidebar; but right now it's confusing for moving from tab to tab, so I prefer sticking with what I know.  Too much of my life is spent adapting to new layouts and features when all I want to do is be efficient with the tools I'm already familiar with. That's why I've stuck with Firefox all these years, despite Google's and Apple's attempts to get me to defect to their browsers.

I feel like Helen Keller and someone keeps moving the furniture.

[tilwiti]

I would absolutely love it if you could add Spotify or another customisable sidebar site with background sound.

[gsdghsdfsdfsdf]

I hid it as soon as I figured out how, and I'm unlikely to ever show it again.

The problem I have with it is that it either takes up too much space or reduces the tabs to tiny, incomprehensible icons. I guess you can click the one button (and it took me a while to figure what that did, which is not ideal either) and change from one to the other quickly. I just don't think it's worth the trouble for me.

I will admit that I was not thrilled to have two apparently identical builds of Firefox, one of which had the feature (new Windows 11 machine) and one of which did not (old Windows 10). I haven't checked my Linux box.

Thanks, though, for the option to hide it (along with some other stuff I'm never going to use, like the AI chatbot).

[TomH]

Force enabling the new sidebar is not a "nudge to try it out" though, is it? It's shoving in our faces without even an easy way to turn it off!

A true nudge would be some sort of prompt asking if we wanted to give it a go and with a clear way to turn it off again if we decided we didn't like it.

[Meistro]

Thanks for the great work.

On my device seeing which sidebar item is highlighted is difficult. The border is too vague or there is no background change.

Which item is highlighted?

This maybe due to my OS's default dark settings? I use Linux Mint Cinnamon out of the box dark mode. I am on a mid-range laptop so I have even less contrast on my laptop screen then maybe you even see on a desktop monitor.

[Landrynt27]

This new sidebar is a waste of space & irritating as hell.  Give us the option to remove it ASAP.  It brings nothing to me as a user but annoyance and wasted space.

[probablywrong]

Just want to say I know most people are here to complain but I love the sidebar. It's the primary reason I wanted to move to Nightly. Much better than the massive chunk of vertical space that gets taken with horizontal tabs.

That said, I was using Zen Browser for a little while and I really loved the "compact mode" they had where you could choose to hide the top bar, sidebar, or both with a keyboard shortcut or by right-clicking on the sidebar. Really, really convenient. I had the top bar hidden probably 80% of the time in favor of more vertical space. Being able to mouse over the sidebar is really nice too again just to save space and only see these UI elements when I need them.

Also, I know it's in the works to make closing tabs easier, that's great, but the way many browsers do it, like say Vivaldi, where the tab icon turns into an X on mouse hover when it's the active tab has led to me accidentally closing tabs a lot when using those browsers. I would rather a X pop up in the corner of the tab preview on hover. That would also let me not have to make the tab active to get the button to close it. Just some feedback, not sure how you all plan to do it.

Anyway, great work, really appreciate the sidebar as it is and I'm excited to see how it evolves.

[barkersegg]

Hi, dear Mozilla employees,

Today the sidebar enabled itself, full of useful tools such as:

- AI Chatbot
-
-
- And Much Much More!

This was incredibly frustrating. This, I daresay, was the highlight of my day. I mean this in a very bad way. The last thing I want to see when I sit down at my desk, weary from a long day's work, is that any software on my computer does something that I did not tell it to do. It could be as simple as not working, when I expect it to work. In this case, the thing it has done is enable 'Sidebar Revamp' in about:config.

This is at my most impassioned, this is a passionate plea for anyone out there who could possibly do something about this, this is me crying out from the depths of the abyss where apparently light never escapes, and an opaque wall between the developers and I - the end user - is always up and making conversation impossible: please, do not ever do this again.

By all means have a menu that opens and asks me if I want a cool sidebar with 'features' and such. Do not enable it automatically. I have my workflow. It works for me just fine. It does not need improving. If I feel it does, maybe I could be convinced to use such a sidebar, but it's not going to be by having it simply opened and enabled for me, in a non-consensual manner.

Thank you, that is all.

[m80]

Please do not remove the "sidebar.revamp" option in "about:config".  I prefer to disable it over hiding it.

Matthew

[Encrypter]

A collapsed tab group leaves a blank space where the tabs would have been if the group hadn't been collapsed.

Thank you!

[emanuela]

Tab Groups are still in the early stages, but let's reassure everyone that work is ongoing. This has already been fixed in Nightly.

[Encrypter]

Thank you for the update!

[John906]

The sidebar needs to remember the view when last displayed and return to that view NOT the sidebar menu each time. 

You took the worst time to implement this at the holiday shopping season when all of a sudden this feature appears and the customary bookmark sidebar disappears.  I didn't need them to disappear when I was busy shopping and had saved a load of bookmarks to organize my shopping.  So I panicked but was able to figure out how to manipulate this immature rendition of the sidebar.  Restore the bookmarks and give users an opportunity to choose which they prefer.  Don't force it on them without warning. 

Also the new sidebar is too wide taking up valuable screen area from the web page being viewed, after all that is the primary purpose of the browser. Perhaps Control + B could display of the sidebar and cycle thru the 3 views.  The first press should display the sidebar as last displayed, the next press begins cycling thru the 3 views. 

And please, don't implement a user interface adjustment of this extent without offering a return to the previous setting.

Thanks

[adong660]

Hello, I compared the side tabs of Microsoft Edge and Firefox, and I found that there is a point we can improve. The sidebar is under the Bookmarks Toolbar, which is not preferred: if we set Bookmarks Toolbar to be "Only show on new tab", then the side bar will be lower when we are in a new tab than when we are in other tabs, because when we are in a new tab there will be Bookmarks. That results in inconsistent positions of the sidebar. I think we should position the side bar on the left of Bookmarks Toolbar instead.

[adong660]

The present implementation (in a new tab):

The present implementation (in any other tab):

Preferred (in a new tab or any other tab):

[tpkee]

I really like the sidebar, but I wish we could re-order the sections and pin/unpin some more extensions there. I *absolutely* hate that when the sidebar is opened it moves the whole webpage, it should be positioned absolute to the page, like a popup, not relative to it!

[PDV]

I absolutely hate this feature and I hate even more that it's impossible to remove without about:config. I get absolutely no value from this and it makes my life worse to have it. If I was okay with bull**bleep** like this I would still be using Chrome.

[Keorl]

Hi,

I have no issues with the sidebar itself, being a popular feature on browsers that have it. That said, I don't have a use for it myself. I think that the option to completely hide it should be made a little more obvious, maybe make it part of the presentation of the feature in the update notes tab.

However, I find that it came with big regressions on the History side panel :

• I can't middle click to open in a new tab anymore. Instead, only left click works and does open in a new tab . Which means that I can't open in the current tab at all. I also can't open in a Container. This is inconsistent with all other ways to open a site (bookmarks, personal bar, hyperlinks ...) and as such breaks consistency of user interactions which imho is a no-go in terms of UI design.
• Closing the history panel forcefully opens the new side bar so I need to go and close it again manually. My choice to hide the sidebar shouldn't be voided every time I use history.

It's getting quite annoying over time, and that's a lot of regressions for this simple feature that didn't need any rework.

It also damages 2 of the strongest points that make Firefox better then competitors :

• Firefox Containers, an incredibly good extension that single-handedly justifies using FF over any other browser
• The general user-friendliness where FF allows a high number of very random user interactions so it's intuitive for everyone : ability to right click or middle click from anywhere, ability to drag&drop anything anywhere as long as it can be recognized as an url and so on. In this case, the middle and right clicks disappear from History, *and* you can't drag&drop a history entry as a tab.

[Keorl]

Oh and I can also not "forget this site" anymore. Had to open the big panel (ctrl+shift+H) 😞

[Cheryl]

Is there some way to not always show the sidebar icons? I use the sidebar all the time, but now I'm loosing a good chunk of screen to icons I don't need. What was wrong with having the icons (settings/history/bookmarks) at the TOP of the full sidebar instead of adding a second sidebar wasting space?

[mrbrowning]

I think the sidebar and vertical tabs are a vast improvement and I'm looking forward to seeing things like expand-on-mouse-over. I'm posting here mostly because I wanted to call attention to one issue -- I hope that the way tab groups work with vertical tabs will be getting some attention soon, as right now "collapsing" a tab group only hides the child icons and leaves empty space behind, instead of folding into a smaller area as you'd expect. Also, if I right click on a vertical tab that is just above the first tab of a different tab group, for example a tab group called "Reading," right-clicking and selecting "New Tab Below" adds the new tab to the "Reading" group. I can see there being arguments on both sides of that behavior, but what I think must not be intentional is that sometimes new tabs spawned by clicking links in a tab located immediately above a group that way will also result in the new tab being added to the group below it, which I think is objectively not the right behavior. Still, these are big improvements and they're much appreciated.

[tinytuba42]

I hate the sidebar.  So many sites have ads making the actual content take up less of the screen.  The last thing I need is my browser making the screen space smaller too.  I also had to really search to figure out how to disable the sidebar, and I'm someone with a lot of computer knowledge.  Remove this feature.

[sky007]

What a weird design; ctrl-B ctr-B ctrl-B; Rubbish design; can't be closed

[jscher2000]

---

@sky007 wrote:

What a weird design; ctrl-B ctr-B ctrl-B; Rubbish design; can't be closed

---

There is a bug on file to fix how Ctrl+B works:

(A) When "Sidebar button" is set to "Expand and collapse sidebar"

Ctrl+B expands from the vertical button bar (the launcher) to show the Bookmarks Sidebar. Ctrl+B a second time collapses the sidebar back to the vertical button bar.

(B) When "Sidebar button" is set to "Show and hide sidebar"

Current: Ctrl+B opens the sidebar to show the Bookmarks Sidebar. Ctrl+B a second time removes the Bookmarks Sidebar but leaves an expanded vertical button bar (with button captions).

Planned: Ctrl+B opens the sidebar to show the Bookmarks Sidebar. vertical button bar (the launcher) to show the Bookmarks Sidebar. Ctrl+B a second time closes the Sidebar (similar to old design).

Hopefully this change will get into Firefox 134.0, but it still needs to go through beta testing, so not sure about that.

[evemichael]

Another feature to hate. The browser is one the most important tools and should be one of the most stable.  No one should have to interrupt their work to figure out what the hell happened to their computer and how to remove it. All of this crap should be strictly optional. Now I have an unwanted icon next to the go-back-one-page-icon. Great. Another unwanted icon to accidentally hit and interrupt my work.

[worMatty]

I've wanted a tab sidebar for ages and this is a step in the right direction. However I was hoping for something that worked *in addition* to the horizontal tab bar as a convenient way to access tabs in a list view, silimar to bookmarks. It's useful when you have a lot of tabs open and the limited screen space of horizontal tabs requires more time to find and switch between them.

Ideally I'd like to have my tabs along the top as usual but have access to them in the sidebar when needed.

Also as it stands, the action of opening and closing the sidebar requires me to move my mouse pointer up to the top left of the toolbar to click a small icon. It would be great if there was a more convenient way to open it, say hovering over the collapsed view to cause it to expand, or a keyboard shortcut like Ctrl + Space.