Firefox Adds Tab Notes

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/firefox/tab-notes/

by pentagrama • 4 months ago

40 9 4 months ago

blog.mozilla.org

pmontra• 4 months ago

That could be a useful feature. It's got vibes from the 90s, when there were a lot of different browsers and some of them allowed users to annotate pages and links [1]. I'm sure that there are a number of extensions to do that and still it's OK to have it in the browser by default.

[1] https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2013/04/30/iannotate-wha...

wxw• 4 months ago

Nice to see Firefox experimenting with browser features, even small stuff. I don’t think this solves the user problem they mention though.

This work is inspired by user research that we conducted last year, which explored how people resume tasks after interruptions. One key insight we learned is that when we are interrupted, even a small reminder or message can significantly improve our ability to resume a task

Interruptions are unplanned for. Don’t think I’d be preemptively leaving notes on my tabs to defend against interrupts. Especially since tabs are an ephemeral interface. Much more likely that useful notes go into an actual knowledge base (i.e. the other note tools mentioned).

For a browser tab, I’d prefer to have automated lineage/metadata (e.g. I opened this at X time, branching off Y page, etc) that I can use to deduce where I’d left off.

jiehong• 4 months ago

Indeed.

I’d rather have a local web archive of my tabs in my browser so that i can see what the website was like when I last saw it.

Add to that a background vector db with a RAG for each website visited and I can then search for all my past history of webpages later on, all offline!

Or maybe a right-click and "save webpage as markdown" powered by a mini locally running fine tuned model or something.

Avamander• 4 months ago

I’d rather have a local web archive of my tabs in my browser so that I can see what the website was like when I last saw it

I'd start by having an option for a significantly longer browsing history. Just having an usable history search would help. With the history limitations browsers have right now it's exactly short enough to be practically useless.

Other than that, a local private RAG with my own history would indeed be nice.

1718627440• 4 months ago

Interruptions are unplanned for.

I actually do (did) use kill to quit Firefox, because that keeps the most amount of state. It does no longer seem necessary, I'm not sure, but I still do it out of habit.

cxr• 4 months ago

There are only two ways to make money. One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle. —Jim Barksdale

The original (or just the Firefox 3-era Places revamp?) bookmarks implementation in Firefox had a multi-line field to jot down a personal note or add a description of the page. Even bookmarks folders were allowed to have descriptions—see the New Folder dialog in this screencapture at ~1 minute in <https://youtu.be/QoJXmLuGM3s?t=60>

The "Description" field was removed in 2018. <https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1463738> Being able to capture and redirect the resources that would have inevitably gone into the maintenance costs of this feature over the last 8 years is likely to be the reason Mozcorp has been able to stay afloat on their meager budget that they have to carve out of their half-a-billion-dollar revenue stream stream year after year. Giving users uninterrupted access to Descriptions over that amount of time would likely have bankrupted them.

cat-turner• 4 months ago

If I forget why I have so many tabs open I just close the browser and start fresh. My chaotic GC. I don't even look at the contents.

I have ADHD so I don't think this is the right way to do it.

dizhn• 4 months ago

Why is yet another feature being added before the previous one (tab splitting) is barely a proof of concept?

KetoManx64• 4 months ago

I used to be a bookmarks hoarder. I would create folders for the bookmarks and organize them by category and activity, but about a year or two ago I set up an instance of Karakeep and I have honestly not looked at my Firefox bookmarks once since I did that. that. Whenever I want to save something I just save it to Karakeep which automatically tags it, pulls down an archive of it and also generates a preview of the page. It has made my bookmarks so much more useful than just having a title and a URL that the Firefox bookmarks window has.

Firefox Adds Tab Notes

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