613971 - Replace SeaMonkey sidebar code with something more modern

Status: NEW

(SeaMonkey :: Sidebar, defect)

Description

[Manuel Reimer]

The SeaMonkey sidebar, as it's currently designed, has several disadvantages. To just name a few of them: Backend-Code is a total mess, tabs make you lose horizontal screen space in sidebar, difficult or impossible to integrate with Places (load bookmarks into sidebar), difficult to open a website of your choice into sidebar.

There are many more bugs, caused by the current sidebar design. I'll mark some of them as being blocked by this one, later.

Much work already has been done by Philip Chee in his xsidebar project: http://xsidebar.mozdev.org/. I think this is a very good base, we should start with.

To get a good replacement for the tabs, the sidebar menu, only available via "View -> Sidebars" on Firefox, should be also available in the sidebar itself (as already implemented in xsidebar). Maybe we should even have the bookmarks, configured to open in the sidebar, available in this menu.

Comment 1

[Philip Chee]

I'll probably make a stab at getting xSidebar code into SeaMonkey once I've cleared the bugs I'm currently working on.

Comment 2

[Manuel Reimer]

Thanks in advance. Keep in mind, that the whole RDF stuff will go away! No panels.rdf in profile and with my fix for Bug 399310 "local-panels.rdf", which was part of SeaMonkey itself, already has been deleted and replaced by broadcasters, your new code may use.

Comment 3

[Robert Kaiser]

I guess this in the end will also solve bug 411526 by just killing the "sidebar directory" feature altogether, right?

Comment 4

[Manuel Reimer]

Exactly. Added this bug to the "blocked" list.

Comment 5

[Manuel Reimer]

We don't need the nsISidebar fork to modernize the sidebar code!