launchpad sidebar?

[James Henstridge]

On 5/11/06, Steve Alexander <steve at canonical.com> wrote:
> This Mozilla sidebar for Python developers is cool:
>
>   http://starship.python.net/crew/skippy/mozilla/
>
> I'd love to see something like this for Launchpad, on Firefox.

Sidebars are essentially just web pages, so while you can use XUL
(like Mark did) it is also possible to do plain HTML.

With firefox, there are two ways of opening a page in the sidebar:

1. create a link like <a target="_search" href="...">...</a>.  When
the link is clicked, the referenced page will be opened in the
sidebar.  This method also apparently works for internet explorer.

2. use the window.sidebar.addPanel() javascript API, which will prompt
the user to create a bookmark to open the sidebar.

I'm not sure how useful a general "Launchpad sidebar" would be in
practice, but there are definitely some useful things we could do with
approach (1).

For example, a bug listing page could have an "open search results in
sidebar" link that would let people keep a set of search results
visible without using the back/forward browser buttons or lots of
tabs.

James.