380566 - autohide bookmark sidebar

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Toolbars and Customization, enhancement, P5)

Description

[grylend]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.11) Gecko/20070312 Firefox/1.5.0.11

The bookmark sidebar is very useful but take too much space.

Please add an option to autohide it on mouseover, at least when the app window is maximized.

Reproducible: Didn't try

Comment 1

[Ria Klaassen (not reading all bugmail)]

Sounds like bug 260073. Although that one is filed for full screen, not for maximized screen. I think most people won't use such a feature. There is an extension for it, Optimoz Tweaks. I assume also other extensions, like Mouse Gestures or similar can be configured for that function.

Comment 2

[grylend]

(In reply to comment #1)
> Sounds like bug 260073. Although that one is filed for full screen, not for
> maximized screen. I think most people won't use such a feature. There is an
> extension for it, Optimoz Tweaks. I assume also other extensions, like Mouse
> Gestures or similar can be configured for that function.

I don't agree, because these kind of UI improvements make the difference versus 
Internet Explorer, especially with common users.
Common users don't understand security issues and tend to favour IE just for the better user interface.

Anyway, Optimoz Tweaks, and all other plugins around, implements the autohide feature without overlaying the sidebar, so it isn't so useful in terms of space optimization. The web content area should stay in background, just as the Windows tastbar to be more clear.

Comment 3

[Stephanie Daugherty [:sdaugherty]]

Confirming as a feature request, this is very similar to bug 260073 per comment #1 - but because that bug only deals with fullscreen mode, I'm duping 260073 forward. 

Comment 5

[lolipopplus]

I think we need to discuss this now again.
Since all legacy addons are disable, there is no mean to override default sidebar behavior. Such a feature can be really fancy for screen resolutions at 16:9, 1366*768 for example.

Comment 6

[:Gijs (he/him)]

I don't think this is something we should prioritize right now. It's an interesting idea, but there are a lot of outstanding issues, like:

- how do users toggle autohide
- how do we deal with performance, given that even fixing bug 1369397 is so non-trivial that we haven't done it yet
- does the autohidden version of the sidebar overlap web content, or shift it like the current sidebar?
- would there be cases where the autohide behaviour would be problematic in interacting with web content? Right now we don't have a window border for maximized windows, so the trigger area for e.g. an "appear on mouse hover" implementation would overlap the webpage. Or we'd have to add an actual border, which then breaks certain layout things.

So it's not really straightforward. People in the core team don't have cycles to implement this right now, and I'm not convinced this is a high priority (compared to, say, further performance fixes, tab hiding implementation etc. etc.). I think we would consider this feature but only if appropriate consideration was given to these concerns - so we'd need a plan first (which folks on the core teams agree is a good one) and a patch afterwards.

Comment 7

[lolipopplus]

(In reply to :Gijs from comment #6)
> I don't think this is something we should prioritize right now. It's an
> interesting idea, but there are a lot of outstanding issues, like:
> 
> - how do users toggle autohide
> - how do we deal with performance, given that even fixing bug 1369397 is so
> non-trivial that we haven't done it yet
> - does the autohidden version of the sidebar overlap web content, or shift
> it like the current sidebar?
> - would there be cases where the autohide behaviour would be problematic in
> interacting with web content? Right now we don't have a window border for
> maximized windows, so the trigger area for e.g. an "appear on mouse hover"
> implementation would overlap the webpage. Or we'd have to add an actual
> border, which then breaks certain layout things.
> 
> So it's not really straightforward. People in the core team don't have
> cycles to implement this right now, and I'm not convinced this is a high
> priority (compared to, say, further performance fixes, tab hiding
> implementation etc. etc.). I think we would consider this feature but only
> if appropriate consideration was given to these concerns - so we'd need a
> plan first (which folks on the core teams agree is a good one) and a patch
> afterwards.

Thank you for your patience.
Actually, this feature is a "leftover" after legacy addon, specifically Omnisidebar: https://github.com/Quicksaver/OmniSidebar
The handling method for performance is simple there: an option to disable the animation.
And the window border solution is pretty hacking there.
So perhaps a new test pilot project?
Anyway, I'm sure that auto-hiding can be helpful in many use cases.
Plus, users don't usually care web page content blocked if the sidebar can go away by moving the mouse a bit.
Also, if there will be be problematic in interacting with web content, simply provide another option to place the sidebar at the right side instead of the left, just like Omnisidebar.