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Vlad

Regarding the sidebar size, that only matters if you have it visible all the time. I only want it to be visible when I need it, at which point I want it wide so things are not cramped. People who want the bar on the side have enough horizontal space and looking to trade it for vertical space.

Do you have data on how people are using the browser? Which settings are important to them? It may help

  1. Make some good defaults
  2. Avoid unnecessary options that makes the configuration more complex

    bg-d

    Appreciate the figma 🙂

    Few comments,

    1

    For the windows sidebar, what does it mean when they're grayed out? Do they have no window currently open to them? Do they have no non-suspended tabs? I think that groups with active tabs should have some sort of indicator, in case of "where is that music coming from???" situations.
    EDIT: grayed out means that they're suspended, accent color means that its active. There is a right click suspend option in the current implementation, and itll probably be in this new version too.

    2

    I think that the option for "switch windows in-place" should always be on, and if the user wants to open them in another window there should be a right click option to open the tab group in a new window. Opening them in a new window creates unintuitive behaviour, especially when the window is closed. Do the tabs get suspended? Do they continue being active? It may not be very clear to the user

    The separation of the tab groups also makes it very hard to visualise it as one workspace.

    3

    Side scrolling on the sidebar should switch between the windows, tabs, etc sidebar. Maybe vertical overscrolling can switch tab groups too, because in the windows sidebar they're positioned on top of each other and it would make sense that scrolling far up/down "breaks into" the next tab group over.

    4

    In the search bar, does the tab search also contain tabs in other tab groups? It should, but have an indicator that its in a different tab group. Then pressing enter should switch to that tab group in-place.

    5

    Can the "⭐Some Window" popup instead have a chevron.left (the squashed < character) that brings the user to the windows sidebar? In the current concept, from what I see, the windows sidebar and the popup do exactly the same thing. It makes more sense to me to just simplify the navigation.

    Of course, the counter-argument is that the window switcher popup still lets you see the tabs and you don't have context loss. I still think that the simplification is worth it though.

    Otherwise, I think this is a fantastic concept. Good job, orion team!

      mazil Yeah that is an interessting idea. Basically auto hide the toolbar when you scroll down and make it pop up when you scroll up.

      Would like to hear what "urlbar in sidebar" proponents say to this?

      And feels like it could be an option in horizontal tabs mode too.

        Vlad So no different than focus mode on mobile? The address bar is hidden when scrolling down, and reappears when scrolling up? I like that idea a lot.

          Do "urlbar in sidebar" people thnk this is a good idea?

            Personally, if I want the URL bar in the side (not top), I don't want/need to see it on top.

              Vlad If it’s in the sidebar, it doesn’t need to be on the top. If it’s on the top and hidden on scroll down, there’s no need for it in the sidebar. I’d be fine with either solution.

                Vlad

                I do feel like the url should be part of the current viewing tab (on top of it) instead of in the sidebar which is mainly for window/tab swicthing. and in this case we can have a full url too.

                Dhuv People who want the bar on the side have enough horizontal space and looking to trade it for vertical space.

                Not everyone. I am happy with compact URL bar and sidebar tabs specifically for tree style tabs and being able to read the tab titles at any moment. Much of the web has a lot of horizontal padding especially when using content blockers, hiding the sidebar is slick but on a lot of web pages doesn't really yield more than extra blank space. Vertical space is plenty good enough with current sidebar/compact URL

                  I would like for us to approach a concunsus here. We can not make this an option. So we have to decide which direction to take.

                    There are 55 people who upvoted this, I'd appreciate an opinon from at least 1/3

                    The latest proposal was

                      Do we really need button to close sidebar?

                      could be used to add functionality allowing for showing the sidebar only when mouse hovers on the left side

                      here are too many buttons here. why are there two of the

                        Vlad I really like the whole concept. I think it’s come super far in the past few weeks and become what I was personally looking for initially.

                          Vlad I just don't like it. Can't see full URL. It's going to look cluttered with more than 4 or 5 toolbar controls (I currently have 10 plus an overflow menu). Takes up far more space than the compact toolbar ever did. Will make Orion really impractical to use in split screen mode.

                          Someone above suggested autohiding the url/toolbar and that seems like a much more practical and inoffensive way to save vertical space.

                          Keep the row of buttons at the bottom of the sidebar though, that's great.

                          Vlad

                          My concern about this auto hiding is that it may cause some UI elements, especially in the sidebar, to jump around.

                          If the toolbar is hidden, then the content in the sidebar all moves up to fill in the gaps, vice versa. If that happened too often when scrolling up/down a page, I'd get quite annoyed.

                          On mobile, this is fine because its simply the address bar being shown or hidden. It isn't the entire bunch of vertical tabs moving a centimeter on the screen.

                          • Vlad replied to this.

                            TheOtherKai That content in sidebar is not tied to the toolbar at all. nothing would change there?

                            Another way to treat the entire thing is to add auto-show to focus mode.

                            Shown here in sigma browser

                            I am trying to identify do people want more space (which this provides) or they want urlbar in sidebar (and if that why?)