I’m excited about using Leo AI since I just found that it has the ability to utilize local models from LMStudio. However, accessing the chat window currently requires navigating to a separate full Leo AI page when pressing the Leo AI button or being forced to use the sidebar. I find this to be rather disruptive in my workflow and I don’t find myself using it as much as I would like to.
An improvement would be for clicking the Leo AI button to directly open a sidebar chat window, enabling quick and easy conversations without interrupting my current tasks. This could be an option in Leo AI settings as an alternative behavior for the button, or ideally, the default behavior.
Secondly, when opening that sidebar chat via the icon, it shouldn’t display the main sidebar menu. Efficient use of space is crucial with browser-integrated assistants, and displaying the full sidebar is redundant, especially if the user has the sidebar hidden. If someone wants to use the sidebar than they will have a button in the browser bar, the sidebar shown, or the sidebar set to hover so forcing the sidebar to be shown feels redundant. This behavior can of course only apply to a user if they have the sidebar specifically set to hidden which would be the easier implementation.
I have attached images of before and after. This may not look like a large change however on crowded web pages such as YouTube, or text heavy pages such as Wikipedia every pixel counts, less space being used by unneeded UI elements such as the sidebar means more space for the content of the web page and less obtrusive the LLM chat bar becomes.
Before
After
Lastly, I’ve encountered a usability issue with my multi-monitor setup (vertical and horizontal displays). When viewing text-heavy webpages on my vertical monitor, the sidebar significantly impacts readability. To improve this, I suggest that when a webpage exceeds a certain aspect ratio, the chat bar automatically appears at the bottom of the page instead of the side, preserving more content space. An example illustrating the problem and solution is attached below.
Before
After
While the 2nd issue dealing with vertical monitors is an annoyance my main grievance is definitely the first issue I listed. Thank you for reading this and I hope some thought is put into my suggestions and how Leo AI is handled overall.