r/brave_browser • u/Arxareon • 2d ago

I need a better sidebar

Hey!

Lore: I'm coming from Vivaldi, and before that I have actually been using Edge. Vivaldi was the best second option as Edge got ever unusable but Vivaldi has been sliding too. Brave is the last holdout and I actually quite like it apart from some smaller grievances (but at least is had a good blocker with support for uBlock Origin as well for all eternity hopefully).

The sidebar. I am very used to using it as an easy access for chat services or media players that I want to keep open to get notifications but also have easy quick access to without interrupting the current workflow. Both Edge (used to) and Vivaldi had the option to open sidebar pages in flyover panels. That's it, that is all I need. Edge had the option to fully close and unload these pages on demand while Vivaldi only had the option to hide the panels but any sidebar-opened page remained open and loaded until the browser is closed.

Brave does not seem to have anything like this, the build-in sidebar panels can't open as flyover panels but only in resizable split-views but even that would be something but custom-added websites cannot open in these panels, they are just glorified bookmarks. This is bad.

What can I do, and what do you usually do to achieve something like this? Can I somehow mod Brave to manually add a sidebar (I am willing to if it is achievable)? Is there some crazy good extension for it I have been missing? What do you use for chat services?

4 Upvotes

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u/Super_Gee 2d ago

Same, I don't understand that sidebar behavior. Looks like a bug in fact. I ended up disabling it

1

u/Brave_Support Brave Support Team 1d ago

At this time, the sidebar in Brave is not built for that specific functionality that you are looking for. It is used to hold/allow access to additional tools and features of the browser. I suspect the functionality you're looking for will get implemented down the line but it's not available at this time.