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

01

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.

02

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.

Right-click an icon to change or remove it. Drag to reorder.

03

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.

04

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.

05

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.

Two computers with one bookmarks folder passing between them
One folder, carried by the sync you already use.

It installs with permission for no websites at all.

Most extensions ask to read and change your data on every site you visit, on the day you install them. This one asks about a single site, at the moment you first open it in the panel, and you can take that back whenever you like.

0
sites it can touch at install
0
accounts or servers
1
bookmarks folder holding all of it
~100 KB
the entire extension

Questions

What does Lightmorphic Sidebar cost?
Nothing. It is free and open source, there is no paid tier, and there is nothing to sign up to.
Which browsers does it work in?
Chrome 114 or newer, and the Chromium browsers that install Web Store extensions: Edge, Brave, Vivaldi and Opera. There is no Firefox version, because Firefox has no side panel API of the kind this is built on.
Where is my data kept?
In your own browser, as ordinary bookmarks in a folder called Lightmorphic Sidebar. Nothing is sent to us, because there is no server and no account. Delete the folder and the data is gone.
Does it sync between my computers?
Yes, if your browser syncs bookmarks, because that is what it stores. This works in Brave and Vivaldi too, which sync bookmarks but sync nothing else belonging to an extension.
What websites can it read?
None when you install it. It asks about one site at a time, when you first open that site in the panel, and you can take permission back at any time from the browser's extension settings.
Does it replace my new tab page?
No. Search lives in the panel instead. Lightmorphic Sidebar changes nothing outside that strip down the side of the window.

Built by Lightmorphic

Lightmorphic Sidebar is one of a family of small, private tools: desktop apps, browser extensions and websites, made without accounts, tracking or anything phoning home. See the rest of them.

lightmorphic.com ↗