The gear popover at the bottom of the left strip is reduced to a single
"Open sidebar settings" item; the overlay/push radio and "Reset panel
widths" controls move to Settings › Sidebar permanently, so there's one
source of truth for the sidebar's own options.
A new sparkle button is added below the icon stack: it opens the user's
default AI engine (any search engine with kind=llm — Perplexity ships
on by default now; Phind is in the catalog). Click opens the engine in
the left panel like the existing web-app quick-links; right-click (or
the small chevron in the button's corner) pops a native menu of every
enabled LLM, each one-click to switch default + open. The button hides
itself when no LLM engine is enabled.
Hermes consolidation. The hermes.x web quick-link added in 0.3.99 is
retracted — the bundled Hermes extension already registers a left-strip
panel (side: "left"), so the web link was duplicating it. Any profile
that caught 0.3.99 gets the stray entry yanked on first load.
Ctrl+Shift+E now opens the Hermes panel in the active window's left
sidebar instead of the standalone Messages BrowserWindow; the window
is still reachable via the ⧉ pop-out button in the panel header for
users who want a free-floating client. The home-page Silent Mode card
for Hermes.X comes back (it's a link to the web page, not a shortcut
to the panel — different purpose).
The strip always drew extension panels first and web apps after them,
in a fixed order. Web apps and panels now share one order (stripOrder)
that the icons can be dragged into; reordering web apps in Settings
moves them on the strip too, and a new app or extension goes to the end.
Until the strip is rearranged, Proton Mail leads, above the panels.
An open sidebar panel (a web app or an extension panel) now has a bar on
top with its name, Maximize/Restore (it covers the page, up to the right
sidebar) and Close. How panels sit next to the page is a choice, in the
new gear above + on the strip and in Settings > Sidebar: over the page,
where it floats on the left of a page that keeps its width and a click in
the page closes it; or pushing the page aside, where it stays open until
closed. That choice replaces the pin, which only existed to keep a panel
open on a page click.
Also: a window laid out while minimized reads a zero-size area, so every
view was left at 0x0 and the window came back blank until resized.
Layout now skips a minimized window and runs again on restore.
Opera's other sidebar rule. A click in the active tab's page now hides the
left panel (web app or add-on panel), so a chat opened for a quick look
gets out of the way on its own. A pin button in the strip, shown while a
panel is open, keeps that app open instead; pins are per app and survive
restarts (settings.leftPanelPinned). The click is reported by
home-preload, which every web tab already runs; main ignores it unless a
panel is open and the click came from the active tab.
Clicking an icon on the left strip now opens the service inside a dedicated
380-px mini-view (quickPanel) next to the strip, Opera-style, instead of a
new full-sized tab. Click the active icon again to close the panel; click a
different one to switch. If the panel is already pointed at the same host,
we skip the loadURL so scroll position, open chat and login state survive
a close+reopen round-trip.
Icons now paint as real brand SVGs (Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, X,
YouTube, Spotify) with their official colours, bundled inside quicklinks.html
so no external favicon fetch leaks the fact that the strip is loaded.
Unknown ids fall back to a letter chip. The strip vertically centres the
icons between two flex spacers to match Opera's layout.
Defaults ship Messenger, WhatsApp, Telegram, X, YouTube and Spotify. The
Settings › General › Quick links section still lists / adds / removes
entries and toggles the strip.
New thin vertical column (44 px) on the left side of every page, Opera-style.
Click an icon to open its web app in a new tab; if a tab is already open on
that host, we focus it instead of stacking another one. Hidden in HTML
fullscreen so a video still fills the window; toggle via Settings › General ›
Quick links › Show the strip.
Defaults ship X, Telegram and WhatsApp. The Settings › General › Quick links
section lists the current entries with a Remove button each and a Title + URL
+ Add row that auto-prefixes https:// and auto-fills the title from the
hostname when empty. Edits write the whole settings.quickLinks array; the
strip view and the window layout react through settings-set, so no restart is
needed.
Settings › General › Updates panel also now runs standalone (no longer gated
by anything in the shared cfg.get().then() init), so a thrown exception in an
unrelated feature can't leave it stuck on "Loading…" any more — the version
line reads immediately and Check for Updates stays functional.
