What do you think about the new "always visible" sidebar (poll)?

Hi everyone,
Just a poll to get community’s opinion on the new “always visible” sidebar which came with 0.96 release.

  • I personally like the feature as it simplifies access to the menu items
  • I prefer the old “clean” way of hiding it completely
  • Either way, I don’t really care

0 voters

Update: new option was added in 0.96.3 that allows hiding side panel completely. Closing the poll.

I think it should have been made an option if possible.

This is a misleading option:

I personally like the feature as it simplifies access to the menu items.

The “feature” is the ‘always visible’ menu. The previous version also had an ‘always visible’ menu. The difference is the old one offered the choice between menu and no menu. The new one is a choice between menu and less menu. This difference has nothing to do with simplifying access to menu items.

What’s improved in the new menu is the consolidation of developer-related tools. However, that’s not the subject of this survey which is ‘What do you think about the new “always visible” sidebar?’

I realize this is a casual survey but, for future reference, a survey ought to be unbiased. This option: ‘I prefer the old “clean” way of hiding it completely’ suggests bias because it uses the ‘clean’ adjective. It implies the new way is not clean.

I believe there should be an option to permit collapsing the full menu into either an icon-strip (like it does in 0.96) or to hide it (like it was done in previous versions).

2 Likes

Can’t agree with you. The unhidable side panel does exactly this - all menu items are accessible without extra click on the “sandwich” button, i.e.it does simplify access. There is no mention of the improved dev tool menu (which is a good change), the hole poll is solely about one single feature - questionable non-configurable unhidable sidebar.

I’d quite like the option to both minimise and also hide the left menu, I don’t really like the way it moves on mouseover at the moment.

IMO the poll could even say 99% prefer the old way, but unless the devs actually prefer the old way also I don’t think it will get changed back!

2 Likes

Respectfully, that’s a misrepresentation of the facts.

In the previous version, if you did not minimize the menu (that’s the mode I often used), all its items were easily accessible, without the so-called ‘extra click’. That mode still exists in the new version. However, the new menu loses the ability to hide the menu, only to shrink it.

Claiming this new shrunken mode provides ‘simplified access’, compared to the previous version’s hidden mode, is a false equivalency. The ability to hide the menu is a feature that the new menu no longer offers. It has traded away one feature for another. Both are useful and the user should have the option of deciding which they prefer to use:

  • Maximized menu (icons and text)
  • Reduced menu (icons only)
  • Minimized menu (hamburger icon only)

Marketing 101: How to remove a feature and claim it’s an improvement.

  • Car manufacturer eliminates the door covering the glove-box.
  • Replaces it with a narrow slot.
  • Now claims that, compared to the previous version, they have ‘simplified access to the glove-box’.

:man_facepalming:

I like the new feature and also hate it :smiley:

We have a view tablets around the house - on the master tablets - this function is cool, but not at the tablet at my entrance, there is the alarm panel - there should no visible access to the menu

I would be happy to get a function to hide it there.

You can use ublock origin to hide HA elements, but this isn’t avaliable for all tablets.

Tileboard is a nice interface also, but I haven’t tried an alarm panel with it yet.

David reports that 0.96.3 will offer a configuration option allowing you to choose the menu’s behavior. If you enable the option the menu can be hidden just like in pre-0.96 versions.

2 Likes

Nice, the best of both worlds :slight_smile:

There’s one important difference I noticed between the demo version and 0.96.3.

  1. Set the menu to hidden mode.
  2. Click the hamburger icon (menu is revealed).
  3. Click on any menu option.
  • In 0.96.3 the menu will not automatically hide itself. You have to click on something other than the menu to make it hide itself again. Just moving the mouse pointer off the menu doesn’t make the menu hide itself (tested with Firefox 68.0).
  • In the demo, the menu will automatically hide itself.

I prefer the demo’s version.

True, exact same behaviour in my case. is there a “bug” report?