Sidebar open/close on hover

DaveOrion We try to strike a careful balance. Apple HIG exists for a reason and many people enjoy Orion because it is a 100% native app that follows HIG (unlike, say, Arc). That is not to say that we are not ready to experiment but we would still like to ground these things in examples from Apple native apps. This is one of the things we are looking into as precedent does exist in full screen mode.

It would be nice if the left sidebar could be open by simply moving the mouse cursor to the left edge of the browser. I am coming from Arc, so that is what I am used to, but it is the most natural feeling to just drift over, click another tab, click a pinned tab, whatever. Honestly, I would advocate for a wholesale copy of the entire left sidebar behaviour of Arc, but that's a lot to wrap up into one request. By far, the simplest improvement, and the one I feel is lacking the most, is just the ease of access. The keyboard shortcut is just a bit awkward, and clicking the sidebar icon work, but is fussy if you want to go back and forth often.

This is simple (and I admit I am unabashedly drawing this from my experience with Arc). I simply want to open the sidebar by move the mouse cursor to the left side of the screen. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Cmd-S works, but it's awkward, and on some website s that trap keyboard actions it doesn't always work.

I will say more generally...everything you choose to copy from Arc will make me like Orion more, but the mouse movement to open the sidebar would be the biggest thing.

Rather than only showing the side bar automatically in full screen mode, like safari, if you hover over the left side of the browser in regular windowed mode it would pop out for you.

This would greatly speed up being able to access the vertical tabs and windows from the side bar. I am coming from regularly using the Arc browser and this is one of the features that I truly miss.

We are planning this for next release hopefully.

I was wondering if it was possible to turn on hiding for verticle tabs, similar to how it works in full screen mode, but for non full screen mode. Being able to hover over the left side of my screen to bring up tabs would be nice.

This is something that I got used to while using Arc Browser before switching, and its been one of the only things thats been mildly irritating. I got used to the extra space you get when the tabs are not shown on screen. However, every time I want to switch tabs, I have to click on the tab icon in order to have my other tabs show up, when can be cumbersome for every single time I want to switch tabs. It would be nice to have the hiding feature that in full screen mode, for non full screen mode

Is there any way to make the sidebar appear and disappear when I hover in that region?
Yes, basically in the exact same way Arc does.

Having a sidebar always open defeats the purpose, I feel, of being able to maximize screen real estate.

maximize screen real estate and provide a new way to interact with vertical tabs

The sidebar doesn't have to be always open. It can be hidden away either by clicking the "Hide Sidebar" button or CTRL+CMD+S key shortcut.

I agree with this. It’s better to automatically show and hide the sidebar when moving the mouse to the left edge, as in Arc, omitting the mouse click step.

I would actually hate that, so if it is made a thing like in Safari, it should be a setting for sure.

I would like to see there to be an option to enable "show sidebar on hover". Similar to how it is handled in arc. Some improvements that could be made are: give the user an option to select between these modes: minimize to favicons, minimize to specified size, minimize entirely (the sidebar is hidden until a hover event occurs).

Arc has this feature, it saves up space on-screen especially when one needs to have a bazillion tabs opened while also being very easily distracted. This open a topic of splitview with two modes that I will cover in a separate request but still I believe this is the place as these features are somewhat intertwined. Split view is important to my work, I need as much space as possible while also being able to switch between tabs, tab groups, spaces etc. quickly and often visually too. Split view and the sidebar in general should allow for some functionality that I haven't been able to spot in any other browser. I would like to be able to have: split view "pane" be able to not only support a separate sidebar (shares the same data of course, but it is separate meaning that it can have a separate "space" open too (in arc-terms.)) and be able to enable the same window to host multiple tabs from different "windows"/"spaces" with some extendned functionality. These split-view panes should be able to be attached to one another with some logic. For example: there could be a separte sidebar, or sidebar section dedicated to this: "attach this tab-pane to this folder-of-tabs-pane, while leaving the third pane unattached to anything, and name it "my workspace"" "connect sidebars between panes". I will write more about it in a separate request. But it gives you an idea that maybe the splitview should have some things in the sidebar that change the way it works on a ground level. I am not sure. The sidebar should be attached to a pane rather than a window. Also tab folders

Hey @Vlad, I appreciate your dedication to wanting to build a browser that can feel like it's native. However, I'd still put in a vote for this option. While Edge's implementation may not follow Apple's HIG guildlines, as an end user, I have to say that auto-showing tab names is extremely useful.

This implementation is largely what determines what browser I use. I'm coming from Edge because it's gotten unacceptably slow, sometimes requiring 30 seconds or more just to load a webpage, amongst massive amounts of lag.

I think an option would be amazing. I don't like the double click to expand feature as much. While it might be faster if you're extremely precise about it, it's actually pretty difficult to mouse over that 20 pixels of space and double click it, and then mouse over the new area and click it again—especially if you're quickly trying to find a specific tab and open it.

Both Arc Browser and Zen Browser have a feature where you can have the sidebar automatically hide and show upon hovering the left edge of the browser. This helps free up horizontal space when the sidebar is not in use, and makes vertical tabs far more worthwhile since they do not compromise the amount of available horizontal space you get.

I've made an implementation of this that injects into the app via dylib, but I'd need to disable SIP to use it due to the way WebKit entitlements work.

My implementation adds an NSTrackingArea that covers the entire BrowserWindow object. Whenever the user hovers over the left edge of the tracking area (with about 5px of additional pixels), it calls the private Objective-C _uncollapseWithOverlayArrangedView:animated: method on Orion.SplitView, note that the first argument is the _NSSplitViewItemViewWrapper that contains the sidebar, and the second argument is a BOOL (@(YES) should suffice). This method overlays the sidebar on top of the browser while also animating it. The tracking area checks for when the mouse cursor leaves the sidebar, and when it does it calls _collapseArrangedView:animated: on Orion.SplitView, which, again, takes the _NSSplitViewItemViewWrapper as the first argument, and a boolean as the second.

I do not know what controls the animation however I can note that the animation permanently changes to the existing slide animation after toggling the sidebar with the existing button, so you can likely just call whatever you use to change the animation in that method at BrowserWindow initialization.

These private methods have been in macOS for over 10 years now and I do not expect them to change.

A demo video (not edited, just my implementation) is provided with this post:

This pattern is fairly common in most browsers that have vertical tabs these days, and rightfully so. Tabs are usually not information that needs to be seen at all times, and adding this allows the user to focus on the content more than anything else. I currently do not use vertical tabs in Orion because of how much space it takes up, however adding this would make it my default mode of browsing.