JEP Sidebars
It should be possible to create sidebars for browser windows which can have remote or local content loaded into them.
Sidebars are UI real estate, just like Toolbars are, the main difference is that a Sidebar is meant to take more real estate, and therefore contain a different sort of content. A Sidebar is more likely to contain data or communication content and have fewer controls than would be found in a toolbar for example.
- Displaying streams of data (social feed, rss, twitter, etc). Example Firefox Social
- Adding controls. Example Firebug, Devtools
- Displaying tab related information
The design would closely match that for Widgets, being 1-many, in other words one instance of a Sidebar would control multiple XUL elements which implement the sidebar on specific windows.
Note: Currently Firefox Sidebars are reloaded when shown, and closed when they are hidden, so initially Jetpack Sidebars will work the same way and if can implement deviations from this behavior at a later time.
- options
- id:
- contentURL: a remote or local url of content for the sidebar
- position:
top,bottom,left,right - length?: this can be done at a later time, it would control the height/width.
- dispose
- on/once/off
- show
- hide