Read/WriteWeb has a new post up by Bilal Hameed discussing what he calls "The Sidebar Syndrome". I think the post has a few problems.
First, the final paragarph is a bit confused -- or maybe I'm just mis-reading it. Either way, I think it's worth clarifying this one thing. The Google Toolbar doesn't ship in Mozilla's Firefox. Google ships a version of Firefox with the Google Toolbar. Mozilla Firefox doesn't ship with any third party toolbars.
What Firefox does ship with is an integrated search field in the primary Firefox toolbar (the toolbar that contains the navigation controls and the address field.) That integrated search field contains multiple search services that the user can choose between and augment if they so decide.
This is very much not a "Google Toolbar". The Google Toolbar contains a wide variety of Google features and access to several of Googles services besides just search. In addition, it defaults as a full browser width toolbar that takes up (in my opinion) valuable content area real estate.
Second, I'd also like to point out that, contrary to what Bilal states in the post, a user most certainly can have multiple sidebars. They just don't all show at the same time. Firefox, out of the box, has two sidebars, one for bookmarks and one for history. Users can switch between sidebars from an item on the View menu or by clicking an optional toolbar icon for the specific sidebars. So, there's no reason that a user couldn't have several sidebars and easily switch between them.
This kind of negates some of what I think that Bilal was trying to say -- that the sidebar space was a zero sum game in a way that toolbars weren't because with sidebars there's only enough space one occupant.
Finally, I wrap up in agreement on one point. Sidebars are a decent way for features to be added to the browser and this space is going to be valuable. There will be more and more services offering up Firefox sidebars. In fact, Mozilla has already partnered with several other projects to ship Firefox sidebars. We call them Firefox Companions and they often extend somewhat beyond just the sidebar, but the idea is mostly the same. See the Firefox Joga.com Companion and Firefox Kodak Companion for a couple of examples.
I'm personally in favor of using more sidebar space rather than more toolbar space given the way widescreen displays are propogating and most web content being taller than it is wide. Then again, sidebars are nothing new and they haven't really taken off like toolbars so maybe I'm in a minority here.
Posted by: Anders | April 7, 2007 12:08 AM
I think that sidebars are generally good solution, taking into the fact that the screens are getting wider and that there is lot of free horizontal space. On the other hand, I think that wide screens are very bad solution for any purpose other than watching movies (and it should not be primary computer usage IMHO), and the best thing one can do is to get pivot screen and align it vertically, as he gets a hell more space for all normal activities (including web, e-mail, e-books, word processing, programing, etc), and to switch it to horizontal orientation for watching movies. But in that particular case, with vertical oriented screen, horizontal space is not useless, and sidebar actually doesn't fit very well (in that case it would be useful to turn sidebar into horizontal bar, which is not currently possible).
Posted by: Ivan Icin | April 7, 2007 1:13 AM
1. Firefox already has a "open this bookmark as a sidebar" setting available for each bookmark.
2. There is a new extension called "Multisidebars" which allows you to have up to four sidebars (left, right, top, bottom) open at the same time.
3. The All-in-One sidebar extension provides an optional vertical toolbar with various sidebar buttons to rapidly switch between sidebars.
Cheers.
Posted by: Philip Chee | April 7, 2007 5:53 AM
.ılılı.wipps.ws.ılılı.™
Posted by: web tasarım | April 8, 2007 2:05 AM
Maybe this is an nice time to plug my 'Panelizer' page. This collection of sidebars for webdevelopers can be found at http://people.opera.com/rijk/panels/ .
I've gone to some trouble to make the page work with Seamonkey and Firefox as well as with Opera, though the styling of the page is better in Opera. Having to use the bookmarks to activate them in a default Firefox is a bit of a bummer though :)
Posted by: Rijk | April 8, 2007 7:19 AM
i like potoside bar extension.. very minalistic, and highly useful.
Posted by: a | April 9, 2007 4:33 PM
hi, i'm using del.icio.us bookmark extention, also using sidebar when talking to twitter using gtalk gadget. but sidebar is only one sidebar at any given time, and browser estate is limited. all-in-one sidebar extention mentioned at comment is close, but not met my need.
i want mail client thunderbird-like sidebar, on which i show contact sidebar and lightning calender and mail holer, which with mouse easily move to adjust its each size.
Posted by: dd | April 13, 2007 5:03 AM
With regards to the sidebars, instead of saying "firefox can only show one sidebar, so there will be a battle", you might say "why can firefox only show one sidebar?". Since firefox *can* show multiple sidebars, maybe you should try to make it easier to discover and switch between sidebars. And perhaps it ought to be even easier to make new sidebars. Eg. if you could bookmark a webpage as a sidebar, so it would show/look/feel as a sidebar when opened. This might be another step in the direction where bookmarks and extensions blur together (as Robert O'Callahan, I think, has talked about with regards to offline web apps).
If you look at the adobe-reader (version 8), as an example, it can show five sidebars (it calls them "Navigation Panels" - "Pages", "Navigation tree", etc.) and they can be docked at either the left side or at the bottom of the window. It solves the multiple sidebar problem with tabs. Only one sidebar can be shown at a time at each of the two edges, but you can switch between the sidebars, docked at that edge, by clicking at the corresponding icon.
Another example is Visual Studio (and other IDEs), which have a much more flexible system where sidebars can be docked at all four edges of all windows recursively and sidebars can be layered, again using tabs. While more flexible, the learning curve is somewhat steep.
On a kind of related note, while talking about this kind of "meta-browsing-windows", maybe it would be a nice feature for a site to be able to dock a window in the windows tray (other desktops have similar areas) in the lower right corner (by default). For example you might want to have a streaming netradio-popup docked at the tray, so it wouldn't take up space in the taskbar, wouldn't be closed if the main browser window is closed and might be started automatically when the user logs on. Another example might be webmail (and business app) notification windows that also should always be open, but shouldn't take up any room most of the time.