I Used Sidekick Browser For A Week!!

Hello, this is TheTechBoy with a special review of the new Sidekick Browser. Sidekick browser is a new browser that is supposed to look at the web in a different way. 

What is Sidekick?

    The browser looks at the web as a set of applications. On startup, you can set up some applications such as Instagram, Figma, the Google suite of applications, and Notion. They also claim it is faster than Chrome and is 'privacy-friendly.' Your applications are docked to the left side of your screen, and there is a toggle that can turn it off. 

Features:

    You can make tabs and links into 'apps', and Sidekick has an 'app store' that allows you to add apps like Google Messages, Github, Asana, and more.  There is a built-in adblocker and it can show tabs side by side. 

Day to Day:

    This browser has a minimal learning curve if you have used Chrome for a long time. The only new visible features are the sidebar and the dual tab icon. The sidebar is pretty self-explanatory basically pinned tabs, but when you leave the 'app' it does not become a tab but just stays open to the taskbar. This can take some getting used to from regular tab management. 

      The browser also has the tab search arrow from Chrome, and its own full search that searches content from your tabs and lets you search the web. The sidebar also allows you to gray out the applications and make them bigger and smaller. You can add multiple profiles like in Chrome and it works fairly well. The browser also supports most Chrome extensions.

  The Sidekick browser homepage shows an image, search, how many l ads and trackers were blocked, and the amount of RAM that was saved. Sidekick is not perfect though, Google password manager is not syncing well, TheTechBoy.org does not load well, and some sites don't play nice.

    On Monday, I was trying to watch Juan Bagnells Twitch stream, and for some reason, Twitch does not support Sidekick, so I tried the stream in Edge. It worked and I noticed that Edge has a similar taskbar feature Sidekick. However, Sidekick support told me to turn off the ads and fingerprinting mode, and then Twitch worked. Also for some reason things like tabs and notifacions are more zoomed in than I would like.

 

    I did miss Google's password manager, and this was a point of contention. It needs to work well and Sidekick needs to get that fixed. The new password you put in are saved to the manager and it works on new sites (as long as you creat the account on the computer not on another browser). The browser does let you import tabs and bookmarks though. I did not use this feature for my primary Profile though. 

                 
Sidekick                Edge 

Should You Get It:

     For consumers, I would say take the week challenge like I did. There is a slight learning curve but it is just like Chrome with a few tweaks. It did slow down a bit when I was using it once, and apart from the password manager stuff  and the zoom the browser felt like a lightly reskinned version of Chrome. 

God Bless, Merry Christmas, and Tech Talk To you Later!!!