This one, small, upcoming change to Chrome’s Side Panel will finally make it worth using

A few months ago, I wrote up an opinion piece detailing how my experience with Chrome’s Side Panel feature was frustrating and how its content seemed completely inaccessible. My final judgement on the matter was that anything saved there became a graveyard that I would likely never think to revisit.

The main reason for this was that all of the articles added to the Reading List in the Side Panel had oddly truncated titles, making them non-legible. I wasn’t sure what to click on because I could only see the first few words of the title, and that, in my opinion, was a big fail on Google’s part when the feature launched.

It looks like my complaints have been heard though, as the developers are now looking to implement a resizing functionality to the Side Panel! Coming to us from our friend Leopeva64 on Twitter, the Chromium Repository seen below details the ability to stretch Side Panel until it covers about half of the screen.

[Side Panel] Initial resizing implementation.

Chromium Repository

This makes me chuckle a bit, not only because it seems excessive, but also because it almost seems like they’re going from one extreme to the other as a nod to my article about the lack of the feature from the onset.

I’m not going to lie though, making such a wide space available to accommodate the recently added Private Notes, Read Anything redesign and more makes lots of sense. This commit is listed as a work in progress, so we should see it appear on Chrome Canary before long. Until then, I’ll keep an eye out for it and let you all see it first hand once it pops up!