Just a few days back I wrote an article about browser sidebars. I simply love the sidebar of a browser. I wrote in the article how the sidebar is one of the main reasons why I love Opera browser so much. But as consumers, it is our right to ask for more! Kidding. However, no product is perfect and there is certainly room for improvement in the opera sidebar too. Here are 3 serious suggestions, 1 issue to be fixed and 1 fun suggestion to improve the Opera sidebar:

Image in notes

This feature has been requested by a lot of Opera loyalists over the years. However, for some reason Opera software has just chosen to ignore it. It would be real nice if we could store images along with text in the notes.

Firefox style info panel

There is an Info panel in Opera, but it is almost useless when compared to Firefox’s info panel. The info panel in Firefox is much more detailed and allows more interactive features like saving images from web page etc. Opera could borrow some tricks from it to make the info panel more useful.

Extension

Every feature that Opera introduced in the past, like Unite, RSS reader and Email Client, are accessible from the sidebar. I just don’t get the logic of not making the extension accessible the same way. I love the sidebar for the sole reason that it allows me to use various aspects of the browser without opening a new tab. Not only do we need to open a new tab to manage the extensions, this also makes it more difficult to access as it needs more click.

Downloads

This is more of an issue that needs to be fixed. Since I have been facing this issue for a long time and I have reinstalled Opera many times during this period, I am pretty sure this is not an isolated instance. My download history simply doesn’t remain in the sidebar. I download a few things, next time I open the browser, half the items are missing from there. As a result I often forget what I have already downloaded and download the same thing again.

Mobile emulator

This is a bit far-fetched, but this idea has always been there in my mind. The sidebar is an excellent place to build a mobile emulator. It could contain a totally independent browser of its own and would report itself as a mobile client and maybe Opera Mobile so that we could open mobile versions of websites on our desktop without much hassle.

I hope these features are implemented in Opera some time in future, till then, I am keeping my fingers crossed.