Some users of my extension have asked me how to remove the extension from the sidebar.
I read on Mozilla Connect that there currently is no way to remove or hide an add-on from the “new” sidebar introduced since Firefox 133 & 134.
I also couldn’t find a way to disable the sidebar_action API so I can’t offer an setting to users to disable this API.
If there currently is no solution to this problem, I’d kindly like to ask the Firefox dev team to consider adding a checkbox next to each extension using the sidebar_action API, so that users may decide if they would like to show or hide the extension in the sidebar, as is the case for “Firefox tools”:
Giving users the option to hide extensions from the sidebar would make Firefox more flexible. I hope the Firefox team considers adding this feature soon.
If you’re looking to hide or remove an add-on from the Firefox sidebar, try checking the extension’s settings or disabling the sidebar feature in about:config by setting sidebar.revamp to false. If no built-in option is available, you may need to wait for future updates.
The sidebar API cannot be disabled from an extension’s settings. Also, setting sidebar.revamp to false disables the entire sidebar, which is not what I’m looking for.
@dotproto Hi Simeon, are you aware if there are any plans to give users the possibility to hide or show extension using the sidebar_action API ? If not, would you mind passing this on to the dev team that’s worked on the recent sidebar improvements? Personally, I don’t understand why this hasn’t been implemented from day one. All it requires is a checkbox in front of each extension that uses the sidebar.
I’m not aware of any specific plans here. I just searched through Bugzilla and found an issue that seems to track this request: Bug 1944719.
If you have a Bugzilla account, you can express interest in this issue by using the Vote button in the Details section. You can subscribe to updates by using the Follow button at the top of the issue page or adding yourself to the CC list in the People section. Both following and CCing will add you to the CC list.
Thank you for sharing the link on Bugzilla, Simeon.
@dotproto I find that information on Bugzilla is not easy to understand. For example, it says: “Updated 12 hours ago”, but I have no idea what was updated and I have no clue if this is being addressed by anyone in the Firefox dev team. Also, no priority level has been set, which seems to tell us that 2 months after opening this bug report, the triage step still hasn’t been completed.
Would you be able to explain what is going on in this case? Why is nobody at Mozilla addressing this issue and popular demand from users?
Hi I noticed this because I use this extension along with several others that have the same issue in the new sidebar. I like the new sidebar, but we really need a way to hide extensions there.
If you have 5 to 7 extensions showing up as icons in the sidebar, and you’ve minimized it so only the icons are visible, it ends up being about 50% extensions and many of which you might not even need at the moment.
That’s really inconvenient, especially since the whole idea of the minimized sidebar is to save space. I hope this gets reconsidered and that an option to hide extensions in the sidebar will be added in the future.
Thanks again for the vertical tabs, hopefully Mozilla will consider this!
Hey @odebroqueville2. Sorry missed your post until now. As you said, it can be a bit hard to make sense of issue reports on Bugzilla. The main thing I look for is comments by users with a username in square brackets: that generally indicates that it’s someone that has a deeper involvement with Mozilla (an employee, regular contributor, etc.).
While this issue doesn’t have a priority (as you noted), it was just assigned to someone. Again, the meaning of this signal depends on the team and individuals involved, but it’s generally a good sign.
Unfortunately I don’t have any insight beyond the signals I mentioned above. It’s not very satisfying, but I’d be willing to bet that progress here is slow because there are fewer people working on the sidebar than you might expect and they’re juggling a bunch of other tasks simultaneously.
For a point of comparison, there are a good number of issues on the WebExtensions backlog that are over 7 years old. Prioritization is a perennial challenge.
Dear @dotproto Simeon, I can be very critical because I’m somewhat of a perfectionist and I’d sincerely like Firefox to be at least as successful as Chrome. Needless say that I value my privacy. The bug, which is actually more of a feature request or enhancement, was opened 3 months ago. It just got assigned 3 days ago (after my previous post) to Sarah who has the permission to edit the bug, but I understand that she isn’t part of the dev team. So, it pretty much is anyone’s guess how long it might take before users see this feature implemented, which leads me to the question: is Firefox open source? Can Pull Requests be submitted? Concerning the scary backlog, can’t AI agents be of any help in reducing it? is this backlog available to the public namely for voting or is it outside of https://connect.mozilla.org/ ?
Yes, you can submit patches to Firefox. The Finding something to work on provides some direct guidance on how to select what you work on and communicate that out to other contributors.
I don’t see today’s AI agents being of too much help. The main issue is that we need skilled people to design and implement features. AI might be able to help make associations between open issues, close duplicates, etc., but even creating such a system would take resources away from other projects.
Firefox’s backlog is at bugzilla.mozilla.org. As previously discussed, there is a public voting system there. That said, public votes doesn’t necessarily match how important a give bug is for Firefox to address; the Severity and Priority fields are probably a better match there (assuming they’ve been set).
As of June 2025, the issue still hasn’t been solved. However, if your main concern is the “Customize Sidebar” and other add-on shortcuts taking up too much space, I have found a better way to display them that I’d like to share.
In about:config, search for “sidebar.new-sidebar.has-used” and set it to false.
Now set “sidebar.old-sidebar.has-used” to true.
Then, set “sidebar.revamp” to false and restart Firefox. You should now have the old Firefox sidebar enabled.
Open about:config again, and then set "sidebar.verticalTabs" as true. Doing this will change “sidebar.revamp” and “sidebar.new-sidebar.has-used” to true again.
Now, your vertical tabs sidebar should look like mine now.
As you can see, all the shortcuts now take up minimal space.
I’ve tested this on Firefox version 139.0.1, which is the latest version as of today. I hope this helps anyone bothered by this issue.
If you’ve followed all the steps but your sidebar hasn’t changed as expected, it’s possible that my results are affected by other about:config tweaks I’ve applied (such as having compact mode enabled). Please let me know in the replies if you have any questions.
Be aware that manually changing settings in about:config may have unexpected or undesirable results. Safety and stability are not guaranteed. Your mileage may vary.
