Resurrect Side View

[Ponda]

Side View is an extensions developed by Mozilla that lets users to open any site in a sidebar and easily switch between desktop and mobile view. This feature is somewhat similar to Vivaldi's split view, but more limited as you can have only one other tab opened and sidebar's width is limited. Its development stopped in 2019, but is still available to download.

https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/side-view/

This extension can be extremely useful. You can browse the internet while monitoring your social media feed or chat. There are extensions that allow users to have Twitter or Discord in the sidebar, but I found only one extensions capable of displaying any website and it was discontinued around the same time as Side View.

While still functional, this extension screams for small fixes, most notably (for me) its pop-up menu doesn't respect system/browser theme and prefers-color-scheme is always sent as "light". Moreover, its usefulness could be (relatively) easily and significantly expanded by increasing sidebar's max width and enabling it to show PDF documents.

Side View automatically completes sidebar with social media like on opera - Mozilla Connect and with PDF functionality accomplishes Split PDF Function - Mozilla Connect and Split view tabs and pdf documents in a single wind... - Mozilla Connect.

[Jon]

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[Edinbruh]

I think this should not be an extension (with the limitations that come with that) and instead be just part of how firefox handles tabs.

Ideally, I'd like tabs to be tiled similarly to vscode's editor tabs but maybe with some tweaking, like having the tab switchers take up the whole topbar even when the view is splitted (to avoid overflowing tabs when there is still space left). But it sounds like a lot, and it would be perfectly fine with much, much less.

But IMHO the most important changes should be:

• Displaying arbitrary tabs (including PDFs, and desktop pages)
• Being freely resizable (it's corrently limited to smartphone width)
• Persist across firefox restarts (it currently "forgets" the open tab on close)
• Add drag and drop functionalities (e.g. dragging tabs on the sideview, dragging the sideview on other sides of the window)

On a sidenote, what I (and probably many other people) want from sideviews, is to make better use of wide and ultrawide screens (which are becoming more common) as web pages get narrower. And being limited to very narrow mobile pages makes this extension useless for this purpose. And using multiple windows is not equivalent, as it's a pain when you want to close your windows and you have to move back the tabs to the old one so you don't lose them, and you are forced to deal with your windowing system.

[Jon]

Another similar idea here on Connect: Split-screen/Tab-in-Tab feature (view more than one tab at once) 

[Ponda]

FYI Side View received an update 8 days ago, for the first time in 5 years, likely connected to the recent work on boosting productivity and improving side bar.