Something has changed in my browsing habits of late, and I’m not sure I like it. I used to be a “if I don’t need it, close it” guy. Now? 25 tabs open – a mix of news articles, code repos, drafts and random stuff I swore I’d revisit… only I don’t remember why.
But it seems Firefox has a fix for my forgetfulness in the works: Tab Notes.
As the name suggests, Tab Notes are small text notes you can add to any open tab:
Tabs Notes in action in Firefox 147.0.1 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS
Accessing them is straightforward: right-click (or hover over) a tab, click ‘add note’, type in your thoughts or reminders, and click ‘save’. An icon in the tab itself then lets you know which of your open tabs has a note assigned.
To read a note, hover over the tab to view it in the pop-over:
Leave notes to your (future) self
You can also edit and delete notes from the tab context menu.
In all, pretty handy. It can certainly act alibi to my intent, providing pointers to my frequent “And why did I leave this site open?” mouth-gaping.
But it’ll prove handy for those with more pragmatic needs too.
Researching often benefits from getting in-the-moment thoughts or ideas down to follow up on later; while shopping sprees involving purchases you leave to linger while you think on, may benefit from logs about notable comparative details, discount codes, etc.
Firefox isn’t furrowing new fields in building this feature as note-taking features can be found in other browsers alread, but often run in separate panels or require you to install a third-party extension.
But Tab Notes keeps everything attached to the tab, which is a neater and more contextual approach for ad-hoc addendums than jotted down on a half-dry sticky note left to peel off your monitor.
How to Try Firefox Tab Notes
You can get an early look at feature in current Firefox stable and beta releases by enabling it manually, but as it is not complete you should not rely on it for any critical note taking.
In stable builds on Linux, notes do not persist between sessions and previews don’t show on hover (‘edit’ the note to see the contents). On Firefox Beta, the feature is far more usable: notes do persist and can be previewed easily.
To try it out:
- Go to
about:config in a new tab
- Search for
browser.tabs.notes.enabled
- Double-click the line to set the value to
true
- Restart the browser (if you see ‘add note’ greyed out)
To disable it, repeat the process but this time double click-click the flag to set the vale to false.
If you run Firefox Nightly/Development builds this feature ought to be enabled out-of-the-box. No warnings for you since you know what you got yourself into ;).
Other features coming to Firefox
Split Tabs are on the way for easier side-by-side viewing
Tab Notes is one of several practical improvements coming to Firefox, among which is Split Tabs (which let you view two tabs side-by-side) and user-editable keyboard shortcuts (so you can set things up the way you want).
Of course, more extensive AI features are on the way now that generating money from AI integrations in Firefox is part of Mozilla’s new “double bottom line”, said to be needed to keep the company afloat1.
But I find these minor quality-of-life improvements a little more convincing. Not things everyone will use, but things which will help those who do – more so than “AI” features chugging away in the background to provide timely tab group name suggestions like “shopping”.
Are tab notes something you’ll be making a note of to try out, or is it note for you?
- Mozilla raked in $680 million in 2024, a year-on-year increase and the highest reported revenue since 2019. But it also splurged a record $589 million on development, marketing and admin, and a further $31 million on buying Anonym. It saved money by axing Pocket & FakeSpot. ↩︎
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