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> It was too power-user for what we were going for

Chrome might as well support the Sidebar API to make this possible like Firefox will do with Tree-Tab-Style Add-on iirc. I read a bug report once at the Chromium bug tracker saying roughly "Sidebar API wont be implemented because UI needs to stay simple".

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Chrome had side tabs for years. Never overtly, but you could enable them manually. But they took them out because someone 'didn't like how they looked' and despite thousands of people starring the bug and hundreds of comments, they refused to even tolerate their existence as a hidden feature. They're very serious about making sure you use their software only the way they want.

Vivaldi has sidebar tabs, chrome under the hood.

I hate the "UI must be simple" aspect of chrome so much. So many features don't get implemented because of it.

Modern product managers and data science folks have a very inflated view of their ability to anticipate their user's desires, IMO. "Simplicity" has killed so much useful-to-the-user functionality in the past decade, like star ratings (fortunately iTunes still has them, at least), intuitive queues (remember the old Netflix DVD queue?), linear feeds of chronological data (hi Facebook and Twitter)...

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