How to load a website in firefox’s sidebar

Home Technology How To How to show sidebars in Firefox

Firefox is among the best and most popular browsers that is focused on the privacy of the users. It has many options that you should explore so that you can decide what stays as something you want to use, and what to turn off if you don’t need it. Some browsers have sidebars turned on by default, and that’s not the case with Firefox. Sidebars are disabled when you launch the browser for the first time. But don’t worry, turning this option on is super simple. Let’s see how to show sidebars in Firefox.

How to show sidebars in Firefox

So, if you want to have sidebars enabled, you don’t have to look for the option in Settings. There is actually an icon in the top-right corner of the browser, and all you need to do is click on it. Just see the image below.

As soon as you click on that icon, the sidebars will show up on the left side of the screen.

If by any chance you don’t see the icon like on the image above, it means that you don’t have the latest version of the browser. So, you have to update it to the latest one. You can do that by clicking on the hamburger icon in the top-right corner of the screen. Click Options in the drop-down menu, scroll down, and click on Check for updates. Install the latest version.

Now let’s go back to the sidebar. When the sidebar is on, you can easily access the bookmarks, history, and sync tabs. If you don’t like having a sidebar on the left side of the browser, you can move it to the right side. Here is how. Click on bookmarks, and a drop-down menu will show up. Click Move sidebar to right.

If you use Firefox, we have a tip that can help you be more productive while surfing the web. Say you want to keep track of your to-do list, or another web page while reading another website. We’ll show you an easy way to do this.

Firefox has a feature that lets you load any web page in the sidebar, so you can view two pages at once. We’re going to view our to-do lists in Wunderlist in the Firefox sidebar while reading How-To Geek.

First, navigate to the site you want in the sidebar–in our example, Wunderlist.com–then bookmark it. The easiest way to bookmark a website is to drag the icon to the left of the website address to the bookmarks bar, as shown below.

Now for the cool trick. Right-click on the new bookmark you just created and select “Properties” from the popup menu.

On the Properties dialog box for the bookmark, click the “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” check box so there is a check mark in the box. Then, click “Save”.

Click the bookmark on the bookmarks bar to open that site in the sidebar on the left. You can browse to any site you want on the right using the normal address bar.

Now you can be more productive, keeping track of your to-do list and reading How-To Geek at the same time.

Do you want to keep up with your to-do list while browsing the Web? Or do you want to keep a tab on some real-time information – like Forex stats – and browse the Web at the same time? Why don’t you open both of the web pages side by side? No, I am not talking about the traditional method of opening two browser windows and adjusting their size to cover half the screen. I am talking about Firefox’s built-in feature to show a web page in the Firefox sidebar.

Firefox lets you browse the Web with a web page opened on the left side to keep up with its information. In this article we will show you how to use this feature.

Note: The sidebar page doesn’t actually behave like a separate browser window that you could easily navigate. It is just a web page with information you can only see and interact with; you cannot move away from this page. If you click on any link in the page, it will open in the original browser window on the right.

Bookmark the Page

To load a web page from the sidebar, you need to bookmark the page first. I didn’t find any built-in method to directly load an opened page in the sidebar. If you know of one, let me know in the comments.

To bookmark the page, open the desired page and click on the “Star” icon in the top toolbar. You can then open the bookmark by clicking on the “Show your bookmarks” button on the right side of the “Star” icon.

Load the Web Page in the Sidebar

Now that the page has been bookmarked, go to the bookmarks and right-click on the page you just saved. From the side menu, click on “Properties,” and check the option “Load this bookmark in the sidebar.”

From now on whenever you access this bookmark, it will be loaded in the sidebar on the left. The space the sidebar takes can be adjusted, but there is a maximum limit that allows it to only cover approximately forty percent of the screen.

Clicking on any link will open it in the right window. You can also use the left sidebar to open a website’s main page and then easily navigate the site without leaving the main page. For example, you can open MakeTechEasier’s home page in the left sidebar and open articles in the right window, saving yourself from opening multiple tabs or leaving the home page.

Also keep in mind that the sidebar will keep itself open even if other tabs or windows are closed/moved. You can either click on the X button on top of it or completely close the browser to close it. If you don’t want the bookmark to open in the sidebar again, then go through the same above process and uncheck the option “Load this bookmark in the sidebar.”

Conclusion

There are many reasons why you might want to open a web page in the sidebar. You can open your email client, to-do list, your calendar app and many other web apps to use them while browsing the Web. I did had some issues loading websites in the sidebar that were not mobile friendly. The sidebar doesn’t have a horizontal scroll button, so you cannot view a full desktop web page.

Are you going to use Firefox’s load-in-the-sidebar feature to open two web pages simultaneously, or are you going to stick with opening two browser windows instead? Let us know in the comments below.

Karrar is drenched in technology and always fiddles with new tech opportunities. He has a bad habit of calling technology “Killer”, and doesn’t feel bad about spending too much time in front of the PC. If he is not writing about technology, you will find him spending quality time with his little family.

Learn how to create a fixed side navigation menu with CSS.

Create a Fixed Sidebar

Step 1) Add HTML:

Example

Step 2) Add CSS:

Example

/* The sidebar menu */
.sidenav height: 100%; /* Full-height: remove this if you want “auto” height */
width: 160px; /* Set the width of the sidebar */
position: fixed; /* Fixed Sidebar (stay in place on scroll) */
z-index: 1; /* Stay on top */
top: 0; /* Stay at the top */
left: 0;
background-color: #111; /* Black */
overflow-x: hidden; /* Disable horizontal scroll */
padding-top: 20px;
>

/* The navigation menu links */
.sidenav a padding: 6px 8px 6px 16px;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 25px;
color: #818181;
display: block;
>

/* When you mouse over the navigation links, change their color */
.sidenav a:hover color: #f1f1f1;
>

/* Style page content */
.main margin-left: 160px; /* Same as the width of the sidebar */
padding: 0px 10px;
>

/* On smaller screens, where height is less than 450px, change the style of the sidebar (less padding and a smaller font size) */
@media screen and (max-height: 450px) .sidenav .sidenav a
>

Tip: Go to our CSS Navbar tutorial to learn more about navigation bars.

Tip: Go to our How To – Side Navigation tutorial to learn how to create an animated, closable side navigation.

Whenever a user opens a new tab in Firefox, which usually is done with the shortcut Ctrl-t or by clicking on the plus icon in the tab bar, the tab that appears is completely blank and does not provide any information whatsoever.

Now this is different if you middle-click a link or bookmark because this action will load the website the link points to directly in the new tab.

Update : Things have changed in recent time. Firefox displays a new tab page with often visited websites (or a custom selection of sites), and a search form instead nowadays.

A blank tab however is not useful at all. A better solution would be to open another website or service instead of a blank tab. Preferably something that is quick to load, is usually the right choice and does not delay the process for too long if you want to go somewhere else instead.

A tab is usually created when you want to open a new url or search for something. You could hit Ctrl-t, type the address you want to visit and hit enter.

What if a search engine is used most of the time or another site like Facebook? Would not it improve things by a lot if that site would be loaded automatically whenever a new tab is opened?

That is the basic idea behind the New Tab URL extension for Firefox. You can select a default url that opens when a new blank tab is created in the browser. This can the homepage set in the browser, the current page, a blank (default) page or a custom url.

The extension offers another nice feature. If you have copied an address to the clipboard and open a new tab page in Firefox afterwards, it will load that address automatically.

Update : The extension does not work out of the box anymore in recent versions of the Firefox browser. You need to perform the following fix to get it working again:

1. Type about:config in the Firefox address bar and hit enter.
2. Confirm that you will be careful when the prompt appears.
3. Search for browser.newtab.url, double-click the entry and set it to blank (no value)
4. Search for browser.newtabpage.enabled and make sure it is set to true. If it is not double-click it to set it to true.
5. The extension works again.

The custom url is probably the only option that makes sense here for most users who have installed the extension. You can select a search engine like google, Startpage or Bing, a social networking site like Twitter or Facebook, a shopping site like eBay or Amazon, or the weather report site.

All-in-One Sidebar was an amazing extension, which was ultimately abandoned by its developer when WebExtensions were introduced.

Though nowhere close to AiOS, there are a few sidebar extensions which are worth trying. Sidebar+ is one such add-on.

Click on the extension’s toolbar icon to view a mini-interface. It allows you to set the location of Sidebar+. Options for these include setting it as a native element (not collapsible), a pop-up window, iframe (collapsible panel), or to disable it completely.

I recommend using the left iframe setting, as keeping it on the right and trying to use the scroll bar is a headache, unless you’ve set the scroll bar to be on the left of course. The gear icon is a shortcut to the add-on’s options.

The side-bar is visible in full-screen mode, which can be annoying if you’re watching videos. But you can quickly toggle it using the F8 hotkey. Another option is to enable the “Collapse to thin-line” option from the sidebar.

Now to the side bar itself. It uses auto-hide to collapse itself when you mouse away from it. Clicking the pin-icon can make it sticky, but this uses up quite a bit of the screen’s real estate, you can resize it though.

There are a bunch of icons at the top of Sidebar+. The Tabs section is essentially a nice tab management tool. It displays a list of all your tabs including the favicon and title of each tab. Click on a tab to jump to its position. Mouse over a tab to bookmark, move, reload or close the tab.

The “Bookmarks” section contains the Bookmarks Menu, Bookmarks Toolbar and all other folders that you created. It has 2 buttons that you can use to bookmark the current tab or to create a new bookmark folder. View all your visited tabs from the History section. The Downloads tab is handy for managing ongoing downloads (pause, resume or cancel).

Sidebar+ has a built-in RSS Reader. Hit the + button to add a new feed, paste the feed’s URL and give it a name. It displays a badge on the RSS icon indicating the number of unread articles. You’ll need to resize the sidebar to view the full titles of articles, and to mark posts as read. But that’s just about it, the extension doesn’t have a built-in article viewer. If you click on a blog post’s title, it opens a new tab to load the article.

The Pocket tab when authorized to work with your account, displays content that you’ve saved. The Search tab is pretty useful, as you can look up information and view the results from the sidebar. You can choose from a few search engines (explained in the next section).

A persistent search bar appears at the bottom in all tabs, this one’s a local search tool that you can use to quickly find a tab. Click the three dot menu icon in the bottom right corner of the sidebar to open the “Configure mouse actions” screen.

You can set an action for the following: Left click, middle button click, alt + click, ctrl + click and shift + click. Actions that you can choose are: Open, Open in New Tab, Open in New Inactive Tab or Add to bookmarks.

Startpage

This is a new tab replacement that Sidebar+ comes with. It can be customized to some extent.

Note: This has nothing to do with the “StartPage” search engine.

The Startpage is basically a set of tiles which act as speed-dials. The add-on seems to pull the most visited websites and generates shortcuts to those. You can edit them by mousing over to the top right edge and clicking the gear icon. This allows you to change the URL, text (displayed on the tile) and the color of the tile. You can add more tiles to the screen, and rearrange the order of tiles.

The Search bar at the top of the startpage is nice. It can search using multiple engines at the same time, though you can pick the ones you want to use from DuckDuckGo, Google, Yandex, Bing, Yahoo, Wikipedia.

There’s no way to resize the tiles, nor can you modify the size of the text. Setting a tile to use a single word makes the font gigantic. Personally, I disabled the startpage because I’m accustomed to GroupSpeedDial.

Head to the add-on’s options to disable any of the extra features that you don’t like.

The extension is open source. If you want a jack of all trades solution, Sidebar+ is a good option. But some of the features aren’t as refined as those offered by dedicated extensions (for e.g. GroupSpeedDial, Tab Manager Plus, Smart RSS).

Interestingly, the add-on’s GitHub page says that it mas removed from the Chrome store by Google. I wonder why.

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How do I move my bookmarks to a left-handed sidebar?

• 1 reply
• 7 have this problem
• 2430 views
• Last reply by cor-el

How do I move my bookmarks to a left-handed sidebar? The instructions said to go to “view”, find “bookmarks” and click on “sidebar”. I have no “view” at the top of my Mozilla Firefox page. I had a bookmark sidebar before but it was lost when I tried to alphabetize them. I have recovered the bookmarks but have found no way to move it to the sidebar. Please provide instructions.

Chosen solution

Press F10 or press and hold the Alt key down to bring up the “Menu Bar” temporarily.

You can open the Bookmarks in the sidebar via View > Sidebar > Bookmarks (Ctrl+B)
You can open the History in the sidebar via View > Sidebar > History (Ctrl+H)
You can find toolbar buttons to open the bookmarks and the history in the sidebar in the toolbar palette and drag them on a toolbar.

For users with Firefox 4:

Firefox 4 has two bookmark buttons with a star in the Customize window.
One star button has a drop marker that open a Bookmark menu.
The other star button without the drop marker opens the bookmarks in the sidebar.

All Replies (1)

Chosen Solution

Press F10 or press and hold the Alt key down to bring up the “Menu Bar” temporarily.

You can open the Bookmarks in the sidebar via View > Sidebar > Bookmarks (Ctrl+B)
You can open the History in the sidebar via View > Sidebar > History (Ctrl+H)
You can find toolbar buttons to open the bookmarks and the history in the sidebar in the toolbar palette and drag them on a toolbar.

For users with Firefox 4:

Firefox 4 has two bookmark buttons with a star in the Customize window.
One star button has a drop marker that open a Bookmark menu.
The other star button without the drop marker opens the bookmarks in the sidebar.

Learn how to create a fixed side navigation menu with CSS.

Create a Fixed Sidebar

Step 1) Add HTML:

Example

Step 2) Add CSS:

Example

/* The sidebar menu */
.sidenav height: 100%; /* Full-height: remove this if you want “auto” height */
width: 160px; /* Set the width of the sidebar */
position: fixed; /* Fixed Sidebar (stay in place on scroll) */
z-index: 1; /* Stay on top */
top: 0; /* Stay at the top */
left: 0;
background-color: #111; /* Black */
overflow-x: hidden; /* Disable horizontal scroll */
padding-top: 20px;
>

/* The navigation menu links */
.sidenav a padding: 6px 8px 6px 16px;
text-decoration: none;
font-size: 25px;
color: #818181;
display: block;
>

/* When you mouse over the navigation links, change their color */
.sidenav a:hover color: #f1f1f1;
>

/* Style page content */
.main margin-left: 160px; /* Same as the width of the sidebar */
padding: 0px 10px;
>

/* On smaller screens, where height is less than 450px, change the style of the sidebar (less padding and a smaller font size) */
@media screen and (max-height: 450px) .sidenav .sidenav a
>

Tip: Go to our CSS Navbar tutorial to learn more about navigation bars.

Tip: Go to our How To – Side Navigation tutorial to learn how to create an animated, closable side navigation.

I just stumbled upon Rarst’s post over at his blog about moving browser tabs to the right, and felt intrigued. I have tried to move the tabs to the sidebar before but quickly reverted the changes, mainly because it takes some time to get adjusted to it especially after working for years with tabs on top.

I gave up before I’d feel comfortable using the new tab layout but I’m so used to the default one that I have a hard time adjusting to a new layout.

The benefit of running tabs in the sidebar, either left or right, is the same as running the Windows Taskbar on the left or right side of the computer screen: more space.

A vertical placement can display more information and more tabs visibly than a horizontal tab bar can.

This is especially obvious if the computer is connected to a widescreen monitor, as most websites do not make use of the full screen width and especially so on large resolutions such as 1920×1200.

This resolution for instance often means more that you get more than 400pixels of white space on the left and right side of the website displayed in full screen mode.

The display width is usually sufficient to display all website contents on the screen, the height however is not. More vertical space means that you see more of the website without having to scroll.

Rarst has already mentioned how to switch to a vertical tab bar in Opera ( Right-click tab bar > Tab Bar Placement). I have decided to take a look at the Firefox browser instead.

Firefox does not offer vertical tab placements out of the box. Add-ons have been created that can move the tabs to a sidebar. One of the add-ons is Tab Kit.

Update: Tab Kit is not compatible with recent versions of Firefox. I suggest you check out the Tree Style Tab add-on instead for the browser which offers similar functionality.

The add-on moves the tab bar automatically to the left sidebar upon installation and restart of the web browser.

The colors that are initially displayed can be deactivated, the position of the bar switched to the right side, top or bottom.

The display can be further customized in the options. It is there for instance possible, and advised, to display a close button next to each tab. By default, the close button is only displayed at the bottom of the screen, which is not very functional to say the least.

Tab Kit supports mouse gestured to quickly switch between tabs, and it is of course still possible to display the first ten tabs by pressing CTRl-[1-9] on the keyboard.

The benefits of running tabs in the sidebar

Below are the benefits of running tabs in the sidebar, the disadvantages or situations where you should not do that are listed in the next paragraph instead.

• If lots of tabs are often open at the same time, especially if that means that not all tabs are displayed all the time in the horizontal bar.
• If width is not a issue, e.g. on widescreen monitors.
• If every pixel of height is of importance.
• If you prefer to have page titles visible all the time (more horizontal space for tabs means more page title displayed)

When you should not run tabs in sidebar

There are situations where it is not advised to run tabs in a sidebar.

• If the computer monitor is only handling small resolutions, e.g. 1024×768.
• If only a handful of tabs are opened all the time
• If the sidebars are already occupied
• If you like to align windows on the screen so that the web browser is only displayed in part of it.

There is one last thing to address. Should you place the tab bar in the left or right sidebar? This again depends on a few factors. If the left sidebar is already occupied you may want to move it to the right. The right side has the additional advantage that the scrollbar is there as well, which usually means that the mouse is often located in that area to navigate the page.

The left sidebar placement on the other hand is closer to the browser menus and the address bar. It is however more distracting on the left, especially in the beginning after making the switch.

Where is your tabbar located? Are you using a vertical or horizontal placement, and why?