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Google Chrome Is Testing a Notes Feature

adminMay 3, 20230 Comment0461

Google is always working on new features for the Chrome browser, like the recent battery life improvements. Soon, you might be able to save notes about pages right in the browser.

Google is testing a new Notes feature in the side panel in Chrome, allowing you to write notes about a page you have open. The notes are linked to the page you wrote them from, so clicking on a note later will take you back to where you made it. You can also edit existing notes, or save multiple notes for the same page.

Chrome Canary with notes

This won’t replace a proper note taking app, especially since there’s no support for text formatting or attachments, but it could be a useful feature in some situations. If you’re the kind of person to bookmark a page for later, you could use the notes feature to remind yourself about what to check.

The feature is tied into Google’s new “Power bookmark backend,” which is being worked on at the same time. If you want to try out the notes feature for yourself, download Chrome Canary or Chrome Dev, then navigate to chrome://flags. You have to enable the flags for #power-bookmarks-side-panel, #power-bookmark-backend, and #user-notes-side-panel, then restart the browser.

Chrome Canary with notes

The Notes feature is still an experimental feature flag, so it might not roll out to everyone for several weeks or months, or possibly even longer. Google is planning to roll out a new page zoom feature for the Android browser in the next update, which first appeared as a flag in October 2021. The notes functionality could also be scrapped entirely, like the infamous Chrome Home/Chrome Duplex redesign that was being tested for several years.

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