This Firefox feature made me ditch sticky notes for everyday research

I end up opening dozens of Firefox tabs on my Mac every day, especially when I’m researching a topic that I’m writing about. A huge problem with having so many tabs open at once is that it’s hard to keep track of what useful information a tab contains.

For a long time, I used Stickies — the built-in sticky notes app on Mac — to write down important notes from these open tabs for my initial research. However, I’ve completely ditched it for the Tab Notes feature that Mozilla introduced in Firefox a while ago.

Tab Notes help make better sense of tabs I open in Firefox

Yash Wate / Android Authority

Tab Notes is a Firefox for desktop feature that lets you add notes to your open tabs. The note can be anything from a short description of why you opened the tab to a list of all the important information you gathered from the webpage open in it.

I use Tab Notes to jot down key takeaways on a webpage that I need later. When I’m working, this could be information about a topic I’m researching. Other times, like when I’m planning a trip, the note could be a list of places to visit.

When you add a note to a Firefox tab, it’s linked to the URL of the webpage open in it. If you navigate to another URL on that page, the note disappears, whereas if you click a URL on a page that redirects you to another section, it stays.

The best part is that the association persists until you manually delete the note. So if you added a note to a tab and accidentally closed the tab or the browser, you’ll still see it when you reopen that webpage.

How to enable and use Tab Notes in Firefox

Yash Wate / Android Authority

Tab Notes is part of Firefox Labs — a set of in-development, experimental features that Firefox hasn’t integrated into its core browser experience yet. As such, you need to enable it manually before you can use it. To do this, open Firefox on your Mac or PC, click the three-dot menu in the top-right corner, and select Settings. Select Firefox Labs from the left sidebar and tick the checkbox next to Tab Notes.

Yash Wate / Android Authority

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With the feature turned on, adding a note to any open tab is easy. Right-click the tab on which you want to add a note and select Add Note from the context menu. Type in your note and click Save. There’s another way to add a note: hover over the tab and click Add Note. Then, enter your note and click the Save button.

Yash Wate / Android Authority

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As of writing this, you can add a note that’s up to 1000 characters long. Considering a standard English word is about 5 to 6 letters, this translates to 160 to 200 words, which is enough for most people in most use cases.

Once you add a note to a tab, you’ll see a note icon on top of it. This makes identifying tabs with notes easier when you have dozens of them open at once. Hover over the note icon, and you’ll see a small overlay window with your note. Firefox shows only the first 350 characters in the preview window. If a note is longer than that, you’ll see the “Read more” text. Click it to expand the preview window and view the entire note.

At any point, if you spot a typo in your note or you want to add or remove information, you can easily edit it. To do this, hover over the note icon on the tab with the note and click the pencil icon. Make changes as required and hit Save. You can also do this via the context menu. Right-click the tab, select Edit Note, make changes, and click Save.

Yash Wate / Android Authority

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When you no longer need a note, you can delete it. Right-click the tab, select Edit Note, and hit the trash icon in the preview window. Alternatively, hover over the note icon to bring up the preview window and click the trash icon.

Tab Notes limitations you should know about

Yash Wate / Android Authority

I’ve been using Tab Notes for a couple of weeks, and I haven’t had any issues with it so far. That said, there are some limitations that hold it back from being a killer feature.

For one, your notes aren’t isolated between normal and private browsing sessions. As a result, if you create a note for a webpage in normal browsing mode, it will appear when you visit the same webpage in private browsing mode. This isn’t desirable for someone who doesn’t want notes added to a tab in private mode to appear in normal browsing mode. Then, there’s the lack of search functionality. So if you have a bunch of notes across multiple tabs, you can’t look up text in a note to find the associated tab; you’ll have to locate it manually.

Finally, Mozilla notes that Tab Notes doesn’t work well with single-page applications (SPA) — websites that load their essential code once and update it dynamically. This is because the browser links your note to a webpage’s URL, but since an SPA doesn’t often load the entire page when you click an internal tab, you may still see the note from the previous view. I haven’t experienced this issue in my two weeks of use. though.

Nonetheless, Tab Notes is a handy feature for anyone who struggles to keep up with the tabs they open in Firefox. And I wish more browsers had this feature.