What's the point of the "side panel'?

What’s the point of having a bunch of small icon buttons on the opposite side of where all the small icon buttons already are in the toolbar? At least, I’d expect the side panel to be on the right side when you activate it, so you don’t have to move you’re cursor to complete opposite sides of the window in order to activate it and use it from the side-panel button in the extensions toolbar.

Further more, what’s the point of these extra icons running vertically anyway? The toolbar is already a horizontal list of icons for extensions. Why not just allow you to add bookmark icons to this toolbar? If the issue is that there is limited horizontal space, well that’s what scrolling and having an icon to expand the list is for.

Seems like the idea to expand your list is already available in two buttons: The plugins button and the hamburger menu button. Why not combine this hamburger menu button into both functions and give it an ellipsis icon? When the user clicks the ellipsis icon, they see a side-panel showing the “tucked icons” (extensions, bookmarks, etc) running down the right side of the window, and at the top of the side-panel bar is the menu icon button (hamburger icon design) which shows the panel of menu options (New Tab, New Window, etc) and it’s open by default until you click on another extension to activate it’s side-panel which replaces the opened menu side-panel. This would be a more useful design then the side-panel feature we have now.

Vertical lists are a lot more scaleable than horizontal ones. So, I could get on board with a vertical list of extensions or even tabs. This seems like a good UI design to me. I don’t understand why the design decision was made to have two UI components separated on opposite ends of the window…

If someone wouldn’t mind pointing me to where this is located in the GitHub repo, maybe I could contribute some effort to fixing this.

Cools, thanks for the info. From what you’ve said, I can presume like these features and ideas that I requested are slated.