Chrome developers have apparently been working on this for months, but now the first images of one of Chrome’s most notable features yet to come have been revealed: notes. Yes, we talked about you can take notes in chromeas you already do in Vivaldi for example.

As with other Chrome features, this note won’t be anything special at first. It doesn’t reach the level of Vivaldi, to continue the example, but it’s worth remembering that this is a feature in early development (it can’t even be tested while it’s open in an unstable version of the browser), and yet it has points that exceed , again seen in Vivaldi .

I mention Vivaldi as a reference because although the integration between note-taking apps and web browsers goes back a long way, it is currently the most advanced implementation of them… if not the only one as such, as a note-taking app. Opera had its own in the past, and today it complements it in a way with its wall boards, Microsoft Edge does something similar with its collections… and Firefox has rejected this invention for no reason.

Notes in Vivaldi are a different story

Regardless of whether you use a note-taking service like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc. integrated notes application as a native feature in the browser itself, Vivaldi has it and… in the future, which we hope will be near, Chrome. Chrome does. A minimalist web browser that turns performance into a virtue and gradually adds all kinds of features, most likely driven by the pressure of its competition.

Overall, Chrome will have a feature to take notes and from what was seen, it will be interesting. Like Vivaldi, it will show notes saved in the sidebar (the same one that already shows bookmarks or a reading list), albeit in a slightly more rudimentary way, judging by what’s been seen, it may be different by the time it’s released to the general public.

How will notes be taken? This is a bit different from Vivaldi, because at the moment you can’t make a note from the beginning, but you do it through the context menu, to the selected page, image or text. We could even call it «marker-notes», because they work as such, and clicking on them will open the page they came from. This is similar to how annotation extensions work on the web.

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In fact, it also works the other way around: when the user enters the page where they have created the annotation, the sidebar will automatically open and the selected text will be highlighted, although it is waiting for the final version, as stated in the Chromium development page, so that the behavior is customizable.

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Be that as it may, in addition to the details of its operation, the functionality itself, being able to take notes in Chrome, is interesting. For what it means – Chrome integrating features of this type, for so long outside of browser idiosyncrasies – and for users who value this class of productivity tool.

The question is… why don’t they just stop people from putting whatever they want on that sidebar? It’s about anchoring Google Keep there, as you can already do in other browsers, and why you want more. After all, since Google will be storing your notes, the service deserves it. In case you use it for more than just writing web annotations, wow.