WWW… Wednesday! Sidekick
by Taylor Slattery | February 24, 2021
Web browsers haven’t changed much since inception, but the way we use them has. While initial internet adaptation saw browsers used primarily for leisure or light research, more people and companies are coming to rely on browsers and web applications for the majority of their work. While browser performance has improved and users have gained customization abilities through features like themes, the browser experience is largely the same for everyone, whether you’re shopping for beard creams or doing serious work.
Browsers aren’t built for productivity. They lack tools that address user patterns in meaningful ways. If you’re the type of person who gets deep into research and finds themself with 30 open tabs an hour later, you know what I mean. When it comes time to shift gears, having to clean up your tabs becomes a chore and can interrupt your workflow. Sure, bookmarks are an option but in practice, they’re a hassle. Not to mention, Chrome is notoriously CPU hungry and its hunger can really punish the tab-happy members of its user base.
We can augment our browsing experience using extensions to create an environment more catered to the way we work, but the internet is full of distractions and browsers lack tools to help users combat them and stay focused. What’s worse is that when it comes to browsers, we don’t have many choices. We rely on web applications for work and our choice of browser often comes down to whichever manages to best integrate the tools we need.
Fortunately, the wait for a browser built with professionals in mind is over. Sidekick is a chromium-based browser designed for work. It takes all of the web applications and tools professionals rely on and integrates them into a single sidebar. Rather than each occupying their own tab, tools are stored neatly together and can be switched between with a shortcut. Not only does this clean up your browser and save you time spent navigating tabs but it enables another powerful feature. Sidekick gives users the ability to search all of their connected web apps via a dedicated search bar. Whether you’re looking for an email, a contact, or a doc, you can find them all in one place.
Sidekick also allows users to quickly switch between accounts so you can keep your professional and personal spaces neatly separated. If you’re one of the tab-heavy users mentioned before, Sidekick has you covered. It uses an AI memory manager to automatically suspend tabs that aren’t in use to maintain consistent memory usage. Additionally, your tabs are stored in sessions that can be organized by date or subject to keep your browsing organized and make revisiting tabs at a later date headache-free. The boost in speed provided by the AI tab suspension is further amplified by Sidekick’s built-in ad-blocker which protects users from ad networks and improves loading times.
Sidekick is free to use for individuals with additional functionality and tools for teams starting at $8 per month. You can learn more and try Sidekick out for yourself here.
Taylor is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Taylor is a graphic designer, illustrator, and Design Lead at Weirdsleep.
This blog is powered by Sessions College, the leading online school of visual arts.
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