The best way to hide the left sidebar in Google Maps

These instructions will show you a few different ways to hide the left sidebar in Google Maps. Location services from the Silicon Valley giant are undoubtedly among the best in the industry, no matter what the industry is. There is, however, a major issue with how the new functionality is tested. As Google’s dictionary indicates, there is no such thing as a beta tester.

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Unreleased and broken features are randomly rolled out to a select bunch of users who have no interest whatsoever in testing them. Even worse, the change can’t be reverted or disabled, let alone left out of the testing group, and it doesn’t provide any options for those users to do either. Sadly, Google Maps has now been merged into the same company. This has resulted in many users only receiving a left sidebar on Google Maps which does not provide any useful functionality.

However, by consuming unnecessary screen space, clearly indicates an intrusive UI behaviour. Additionally, as with numerous other Google tweaks, this one does not have an undo button, so you cannot collapse or hide it. In spite of this, we were able to discover a couple of loopholes in its implementation that could be exploited in our favour to reverse the change. Here are some of them, without further ado.

How to Hide Left Sidebar in Google Maps

Here are three different methods that will help you accomplish this task. Try out the one which is in line with your requirements after reading through them once.

The condensed window tweak

The left sidebar in Google Maps will automatically disappear if you decrease the size of the browser window by double clicking on the top menu bar or by dragging and dropping across one of the corners.

Using the Saved Tab

When you open the Saved tab from the left menu bar, a button will appear to hide this left menu bar as well. It is just a matter of clicking on it, and it will hide the menu.

Via the Search menu

You can perform a random search of any place and it will show the button to hide the left menu bar once the result appears! It’s just a matter of hitting that button once and you’re done.

This concludes the three methods you can use to hide the left sidebar in Google Maps. Please let Google end this testing phase at the earliest opportunity or ensure the button to hide the bar becomes permanent as soon as possible. Our guide will be updated accordingly if and when [and more importantly when] that happens. As a result, you are best advised to use the workarounds mentioned above.

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