One feature I really like about Flock 3 is the fact that it displays my activity stream in a sidebar. While Flock is -- like Google Chrome -- based on the Chromium source code, that particular feature was coded from scratch by Flock's develoepers because there is no sidebar functionality in Chrome.

Not yet at least. Work is underway, however, on building sidebars into Chrome's extension API. The awesome ASCII mock up was created by Chrome developer Aaron Boodman, who also references Aza Raskin's Viemo clip of the Mozilla Jetpack sidebar setup.

Persistent sidebars would be a welcome addition for any number of existing Chrome extensions -- like the many social networking, content clipping, and discovery extensions.

Curious what else is being considered for addition? Have a look at the Chromium Extension API Wish List. And before you ask, yes, "downloads" is listed and DownThemAll is given as the use case. I sincerely hope this is next on the list -- Chrome's download mangler manager is one of my most frequent sources of irritation.

The full sidebar API proposal doc is available after the break -- check it out!

 

Work under way to add sidebars to Google Chrome originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 05 Jul 2010 09:15:00 EST.