1977232 - [meta] Old sidebar deprecation

Status: NEW

(Firefox :: Sidebar, task)

Description

[Ania]

To ease the burden of maintaining two versions of the same surface and reduce experience fragmentation, this metabug will gather the work necessary to:

• Ensure the comparable level of experience for existing users of the old sidebar, with the caveat that UX of the two surfaces is not identical and we are not pursuing 1:1 identic experience.
• Deprecate the old sidebar (sidebar.revamp = false) and transition current users to the new version.
• Enable the new sidebar (sidebar.revamp = true) by default.

Comment 1

[Łukasz]

Keeping a vertical sidebar switcher bar always on top is a misunderstanding. I don’t need this vertical bar; I use a single sidebar. The vertical bar only unnecessarily takes up space and visually clutters the interface.

I know that your goal is for as few people as possible to use Firefox, because then fewer people complain about Firefox. That is your method of evaluating whether you’re doing a good job.

Comment 2

[Sarah Clements [:sclements]]

Description:
Please provide an explanation of the feature or change. Include a description of the user scenario in which it would be used and how the user would complete the task(s).
Screenshots and visual UI specs are welcome, but please include sufficient accompanying explanation so that blind members of the accessibility team are able to understand the feature/change.
The new sidebar that has been enabled by default in Nightly for a while (sidebar.revamp pref must be true). We've added a lot since the original implementation and a11y review (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1879923#c1) and we need to enable this by default before 155 for all old sidebar users.

How do we test this?
If there is an implementation to test, please provide instructions for testing it; e.g. setting preferences, other preparation, how to trigger the UI, etc.
Please ensure sidebar.revamp is true if you've otherwise changed it in Nightly, and also that browser.nova.enabled is set to true to reflect the changes we've made for the nova redesign. Additionally, the new replacement bookmarks panel sidebar.updatedBookmarks.enabled; it uses the same base list as the other sidebar panels we own (history and synced tabs) but with additional functionality to bring it up to parity with the old bookmarks panel.

When will this ship? Was slated for 153 but we'll likely push this to 154. It needs to ship by 155 (nova release) since the new sidebar design is part of the changes and we want to ship it before then.
Tracking bug/issue: This bug
Design documents (e.g. Product Requirements Document, UI spec): figma spec is here.
Engineering lead: Sarah Clements
Product manager: Ania Safko

The accessibility team has developed the Mozilla Accessibility Release Guidelines which outline what is needed to make user interfaces accessible:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Guidelines
Please describe the accessibility guidelines you considered and what steps you've taken to address them:

Describe any areas of concern to which you want the accessibility team to give special attention: I want to note that we recently made the splitter accessible for splitview see bug 2012633, which never was given keyboard support previously, and there's still likely work to do there. Please focus on the interactions with horizontal and vertical tabs and the different settings with the sidebar and sidebar panels, particularly keyboard navigation.

Comment 3

[Anna Yeddi [:ayeddi]]

Refer to the comment #2 above