Tab Notes going live in Firefox Labs - please share your feedback

[asafko]

Hi folks,

Tab notes feature will become available in Firefox Labs in Release 149, coming out in late March. Your feedback in Nightly greatly helped us improve it from the first working prototype – and you'll see some of the usability enhancements land in the next few weeks. Now that more folks would have access to the improved version of tab notes in Labs, we would appreciate your feedback to make tab notes more stable, useful, and visually polished.

What are tab notes?
A tab note is a simple way to write yourself a note about a web page. Notes can be reminders, to-do items, quick thoughts, longer excerpts — anything you want to capture, up to 1,000 characters. A note is indicated by a little sticky note icon and remains associated with the web page until you delete it. If you close a tab and later reopen it, the tab note will appear again. The notes are stored locally and even if you have Mozilla account with Sync on, they are currently not synced to the cloud or to your remote devices. 

Ready to share your feedback? 
Please give notes a try and tell us what works well and what can be improved. One thing we actively seek feedback on is notes persistence – ensuring that tab note remains associated with the web page even as a website modifies its URL when you navigate around the page, apply filters, etc. We're curious to know how often do you experience problems with persistence –  do notes disappear from pages unexpectedly or stick to pages where you don't expect to see them? Please share any issues you’ve encountered here or file a Bugzilla ticket in the Tabbed browser component.

Some of you have suggested changing the current model (tab notes are associated with URLs) and associating tab notes with tabs instead, so we're curious to gather more feedback on this at scale.  

Want to get into the nuts and bolts of tab notes implementation?
Check out this doc for known limitations around tab notes persistence.

If you have used tab notes in Nightly 
Please note that we will turn the feature off by default in Nightly and relaunch it in Nightly Firefox Labs on February 25th, so if you used notes in these channels, you would need to update to the latest Nightly, then navigate to Firefox Settings > Firefox Labs (about:preferences#experimental), and turn the Tab notes on. Once you do it, your notes will reappear intact. 

[Gargi]

Not sure if someone has mentioned already but when you make a note with a site muted, the note doesn't show up until you right-click on the tab and edit the note. I'm using vertical tabs and only my tabs without mute show the notes on hover.

[gharp]

@Gargi if you could provide more details by filing a bug ticket in Bugzilla, that would help us look into this.

[digital_carver]

Are the only ways to interact with Tab Notes via the default tab bar? I have that hidden because I only use TreeStyleTabs for tab management, and I wasn't able to find any way to add notes to a tab - it would be nice to have other UI affordances that expose this feature, whether on the context menu or the main application menu (or both). (Even better would be to expose this to addons via the extensions API and thus, eg., let TST manage Tab Notes too, but at this early stage, having any way to interact with them at all if you have the default tab bar hidden would be nice.)

[pljones]

Agreed -- anything with access to the current location should be able to attach and access a "Tab" note.

[mtco]

"Tab Notes" seem to be "URL Notes," when the user navigates the tab elsewhere, the note seems to disappear; i.e., creating a Note for this url, clicking a link on this page removes the note from view despite the tab being maintained. Whereas opening multiple tabs with the specific url where the note was created populates the note across all of the specific url tabs.

I would think a benefit of a note being part of a specific tab rather than specific url is for information/something to be maintained across all navigations (forward and backward) and possibly across tab containers.

Possibly also integrate the ability to paste pictures/images into the note; obtained from copying images displayed on the page and from the Firefox screenshot tool

[Codurr]

I love, love, love the concept!  It has the potential to be a meaningful tool to help those of us who work in browser based applications.

For it to have value for me, I would need a single view of all the notes I have taken.  That way I could reference my notes, even if the tab has been closed.  Within this view, I should be able to re-open the tab that originated the note as well.  

If my previous suggestion was implemented, I would then suggest the ability to tag, folder, or label my tab notes so I could organize them.  That way I could filter all my notes between projects/work/personal/interests.

And since I'm here...  Just a final idea, provide an option for an "Add To-Do" along side the "Add Note."  That could also help me with actionable work that is present in a tab.  

Thank you Mozilla for all that you do.

[BretG]

It would be great to have a search feature with tab notes. I would use this to not only take notes on the tab/website, but to add tags to help organize myself better. Sometimes a site might fall into more than one bookmark category, so adding tags would help me find a relevant site when my mind is on a different category than where it's organized in bookmarks.

[bokuno]

Yes, I just had a tab note that I had written disappear from the tab.

[janraasch]

Hi there 👋

I really enjoy this new feature. Thank you so much 💜. Great idea!

Some suggestions for future development:

• #ux After creating a note, it's way too difficult to then edit or delete. I first have to right-click on the tab, search for "Update tab note" and then select what I want to do. Especially for a quick edit, it's way too cumbersome.
• #ux A visual indication when editing/creating a note that hitting Enter will save & close the dialogue. Some chat UIs do this pretty nicely.
• #feature: Markdown support. At least for simple stuff like lists, links, maybe more 🤓😇.

Thank you for considering ✌️

[gharp]

Many thanks @janraasch . For your first point, in Firefox 151 we are adding the ability to hover over a note and click the "pencil" icon to edit it. You will also be able to delete the note from within the edit panel. This is available to try now in Firefox Nightly. Thank you for the other suggestions as well!

[JimAA]

First trial of this feature. Note persisted for a magazine article but did not persist for an Amazon product page.

[JimAA]

Previous note happened within a Firefox session. When closing the app and reopening both notes appeared.

[intswmt]

Great feature! I found out about it recently and am confident it's something I'll be using often. I do wish there were both separate 'tab notes' and 'url notes' because limiting it to just the url is a little inconvenient.