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. 

[inktveer]

I find this feature very useful! Now I can remember what I was thinking when opening a tab when doing research over a longer period of time. I like how it doesn't really get in the way when navigating, since you really need to move the cursor straight down to access it (to be clear: I think that's great!). I think it would be cool if you can drag and drop text onto the notes section so that you can quickly move things around there. Furthermore, it would be useful if it could be enabled for certain container types and disabled for others. I will never leave a note on my banking tabs and don't need to be suggested as such, but for my research or personal container it would be very useful!

[work_javon]

It would be helpful to add an option to adjust the annotation text position, such as displaying it at the upper-right of the mouse cursor.

Currently, when a larger mouse cursor is used, it may cover the annotation text and make the information difficult to read. Allowing users to adjust the text position or the distance between the cursor and the text would improve readability and the overall user experience.

[David-C]

I really like the new Notes in tabs feature, especially the way notes are tied directly to a URL. It makes it much more useful than a general notes app because the notes stay connected to the page they relate to.

One issue I have noticed is that the note disappears if the URL changes slightly, even when it is still the same page. For example, if a page link includes an anchor hashtag (#) that jumps to a specific section within the page, Firefox treats it as a different URL. The page content is the same, but because the URL is different, the note is no longer displayed.

It would be great if Notes could ignore URL fragments (anything after the #) and associate the note with the main page URL instead. That way, notes would remain available when navigating to sections within the same page while still keeping the useful connection between notes and websites.

This small change would make the feature much more reliable for everyday browsing.

[aben]

Tab Notes are very nice and I use them frequently.  Helps me when I come back to a tab to remember what I was doing there or what the tab is related to.

It seems to be based on the URL.  At work, I use Atlassian's Jira product, and if I'm going a query, I may start one or enhance it, which alters the URL.  Examples:

JQL for a Jira filter: project = acme
will give me a unique tab name that I can put a Note to

If I enhance that Jira filter: project = acme and created >= -1d
I get a different URL, and the note disappears.
If I go backwards to the previous URL, the Note returns given the URL now matches.

I'd like the Tab Note to persist with the tab, no matter what the URL is.