This guide gives you five ideas for making good use of your Firefox sidebar, but there are many more options out there. What do you use your sidebar to display? Let us know in the comments.
1. Add Facebook Chat or Google Talk
Want your Facebook or gTalk sessions visible across your browsing session? These are both simple to set up. For Facebook, all you have to do is create a new bookmark pointing to facebook.com/presence/popout.php. The important key is to check the box marked "Load this bookmark in the sidebar," as shown below:
Then, anytime you launch the bookmark it will load in your sidebar and be available no matter which open browser tab currently has your attention. With some small changes this tip actually works in Opera as well.
For Google Talk, there's simply an extension to install called gTalk Sidebar. This extension also provides a handy way to send off quick emails from the sidebar too.
2. Add a Video Player
If you're a web video fan, this one's for you. The YouPlayer add-on adds both a video player and a Winamp-style playlist to the sidebar. Adding items to the playlist is as simple as dragging and dropping from the list of supported sites, including YouTube, Metacafe, MySpace and Google Video. Local video is supported as well, so you can queue up vids from your desktop just as easily.
If you're one of those people who, like me, is always stumbling on videos you want to watch but don't have the time just then, YouPlayer can help you gather a queue up throughout the day to watch later on when you finally find the time. And if you do find the time, let us know where it was. And send us some.
3. Add a Feed Reader
You can also tweak it to open to a specific tag, which is handy if you have a ton of feeds and want to open the interface to a specific, frequently used topic. To go even further, you can install the Stylish extension and drop in your own CSS to customize the look and feel.
If you don't use Google Reader, or just want a lightweight sidebar to show a few feeds perhaps separately from your main reader of choice, you might want to check out Sage. It's a popular and easy-to-use lightweight feed reading add-on that supports OPML import/export and integration with the Firefox bookmark system.
4. Add Google Docs
If you do a lot of work in the Google Docs cloud, you might want to try out this handy extension. gDocsBar features drag and drop support to upload files simply by dropping them onto your sidebar.
Allowing you to search and filter to locate your documents, gDocsBar also includes smart folders, templates and webclips for a very full-featured document management experience all from the convenience of your browser sidebar.
5. Use It For Tabs
If you find yourself having to make an appointment with your eye doctor for bifocals just so you can read the miniscule text on the 87 browser tab labels you have open, this sidebar tip may be for you. Tree Style Tab is an extension that does a couple of very useful things: moves your tab collection into a sidebar and arranges the tabs vertically instead of horizontally, and establishes a Windows Explorer-style hierarchy amongst the open pages to make it easier to show or hide entire collections of tabs.
Not only does it make the tab labels a lot easier to read and thus find the open tab you're looking for, but it makes it possible to close a related collection of tabs in one fell swoop, or hide it to get it out of the way in a large collection of open pages.
And actually, this tip doesn't technically make use of the "real" sidebar at all, so you can still double this trick up with any of the above suggestions, or another Firefox sidebar extension of your choosing.
As always, have another great Firefox sidebar tip to share with other readers? Get thee to our comment form!
More Firefox resources from Mashable:
- 20+ Great Twitter Tools for Firefox
- 20 Simple Productivity Tools for Bloggers
- 16 Great Music Add-Ons for Firefox