In bug 1452645 [1] we are planning to remove the "Load this bookmark in
sidebar" feature. As part of this we will also be removing support for
rel="sidebar" in anchor elements.
In the future, anchor elements with rel="sidebar" will be treated like
normal anchor elements.
We are planning to make the change in Firefox 63.
From the specifications side, rel="sidebar" is only implemented by
Firefox [2] and although it seems to have been mentioned in early
versions of the HTML 5 specification, it isn't in the final version.
Extensions are able to open pages in the sidebar [3] (e.g. side view
[4]), and intercept loads (e.g. see the Facebook Container add-on [5]),
hence, they could add very similar functionality.