No new sidebar add-ons?

Add-ons Development
#1

I’m a user of a particular premium service with a Firefox add-on. One of the features of this add-on was (until very recently) that it presented itself as a sidebar (docked to the left while leaving your browsing experience unobstructed to the right). With the newest version of the add-on the company has made a lot of angry customers by removing this sidebar in favor of a typical button with dropdown panel.

The reason I’m here is that they’ve cited changes to the add-on SDK as the reason they can’t do a sidebar anymore (“Sidebar plugins are not possible any more using the latest SDK”). I’m just wondering if this is truly the case. Did something change in a new version that removes support for this kind of sidebar/docking?

#2

The SDK sidebar API is a low-level API and Mozilla has announced that these will, at some point in the next year or two, be considered deprecated. So far as I know it continues to work for now and there has been no formal announcement of support being dropped. I’d be amazed if your addon used only high-level APIs.

The SDK sidebar API was only completed in Firefox 29. Maybe your addon is actually doing something else to create its sidebar? Anyway, for now there doesn’t seem any hard reason that you can’t have a sidebar in an SDK addon, and you can certainly have them in other addons. The official announcement may be hiding other reasons why they dropped this.

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