Lightmorphic Sidebar
A side panel for Chrome
Seventeen tabs open.One of them you actually keep going back to.
Put that one down the side instead, where it stays while you read everything else. There is a working one on this page, have a go at it.
Chrome, Edge, Brave, Vivaldi, Opera · no account · no server · nothing sent anywhere
It opens on a search box, and leaves your new tab alone.
Most extensions that offer you a search box take over your new tab page to do it. This one puts it in the panel, and the results appear in the panel too. Nothing it does reaches outside that strip down the side.
Seven engines as seven letters. D for DuckDuckGo, G for Google, I for its images, then Bing, Startpage, Mojeek and Qwant. Press a letter and it searches there. No menu, no second click, and the letter stays lit so you can see where the box is pointed.
Results come back in the site's phone layout, because the panel is about a phone wide and a desktop page in it is unreadable. Come back from a result and your words are still in the box, selected, so trying the same search somewhere else is one key.
Found the one you wanted? Open hands that page to the main window at full width and puts the panel back on the search box.
Pin the site. It opens beside the page, not instead of it.
Press + on the rail and whatever you are looking at becomes an icon. Click the icon and the site loads in the panel: your mail, a chat, the docs you keep checking, while the page you were reading stays exactly where it was.
A site's icon is taken when you pin it and kept, so the rail looks right from the first click, whether or not you have been to the site before. Cookie banners you have already answered stay answered: a site in a panel is inside a frame, and a browser normally hides a framed site from its own settings, so the panel is given a copy of them.
Right-click an icon to change or remove it. Drag to reorder.
A scratchpad that outlives the tab you were on.
The address someone read out. The half-written reply. The number you will need in four minutes. It is in the panel, not in a document you have to find, name and save.
Snippets that land where the cursor is.
Click one and the text goes into the box you were typing in, at the cursor. Not onto the clipboard to be pasted later, into the field, where you wanted it.
Right-click to edit. Click away and it saves. Nothing to press.
It syncs through your bookmarks. That is the whole trick.
Everything you save is kept as ordinary bookmarks in one folder. Your browser already syncs those. Brave and Vivaldi sync bookmarks even though they sync nothing else about extensions, so your panel arrives on your other machine with nothing to sign into.