Load a bookmark in a sidebar in Chrome (as in Firefox)

Question

I have long been a fan of Firefox; recently I have decided to give Chrome a try. I am hoping that Chrome has some equivalent to loading a bookmark in a sidebar. Not the bookmarks menu, but the bookmarked page itself, like Firefox does. For example, sometimes I want my Esperanto dictionary open in the sidebar while I browse pages in Esperanto.

In the screenshot, I clicked on the vortaro button on the bookmarks toolbar after visiting the IKUE webpage. Vortaro is the grey side panel and IKUE is the one with the green background.

Answer 1

This thread mentions a way to do it by wrapping the bookmark url into a little JavaScript. For instance, to load http://google.com in a sidebar, add a bookmarklet with this as the URL:

javascript:A14nH=location.href;L3f7=A14nH;R1Gh7="http://google.com";if(L3f7&&R1Gh7){Fr4Q='<frameset%20cols=\'*,*\'>\n<frame%20src=\''+L3f7+'\'/>';Fr4Q+='<frame%20src=\''+R1Gh7+'\'/>\n';Fr4Q+='</frameset>';with(document){write(Fr4Q);void(close())}}else{void(null)}

Of course, that isn't persistent across tabs, but it's a neat thing to try out nevertheless.

Native support for a sidebar was declined, possibly delegating that to extensions. The functionality enabling extensions to do this hasn't been implemented, and at one point looked like it never would, but a proposal has been under development (preliminary documentation here).

It's been suggested that the dev team is instead focusing on the panels feature (video demo), but it hasn't landed on the browser yet. There's the Panelize extension that promises to allow any page to be loaded in a panel, but as far as I know it only works in ChromeOS.

---

TL;DR: No, it's not possible yet, but some workarounds may do the job depending on your needs; and support for a proper sidebar (through extensions) is under development.