Firefox Notes

» see testpilot.firefox.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

On 1 August 2017 Mozilla announced three new Test Pilot experiments at once. One was Send, which has its own grave here, and one was Voice Fill. The third was Notes, described in that post as "a simple, convenient place" for notes, "all within Firefox", with a promise attached: "We're also working to build in support for Firefox Accounts, so you can sync your notes wherever you use Firefox." It was a sidebar. You pressed a button in the toolbar and a panel slid out beside the page. Then you typed.

The sync promise landed in December 2017, and it is what turned a text box into a product. Notes were encrypted and tied to a Firefox Account, so the sidebar on a work machine and the sidebar on a home machine held the same text. On 10 July 2018 Mozilla shipped its first mobile Test Pilot experiments, and Notes was one of the two, alongside the password manager that became Lockwise and then died in its own turn.

Test Pilot was the program Mozilla used to say, out loud and in advance, that a thing might not survive. That is the honest frame for every product that came out of it. Nobody was misled about the risk, which does not help anybody who had three years of notes in a sidebar and had to remember to export them.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what sync was for ~

Browser-resident note tools keep being invented because the browser is where the text already is. You are reading a page and you want to keep four words off it. Every alternative to a sidebar involves leaving the page. The sidebar removed that trip. Firefox Notes was not trying to be an outliner or a wiki, and the add-on store summary still reads, in the present tense, "Displays a sidebar that lets you take notes on web pages."

What made it Mozilla's rather than anybody's was the account layer. Encrypted sync through Firefox Accounts put the notes in the same trust envelope as bookmarks and passwords. A note extension that asks you to sign into somebody else's web service is making a different offer. That envelope costs money every month to operate, and it is the half that got switched off.

~ 18 september 2020 ~

The announcement went out on 18 September 2020, naming Firefox Send and Firefox Notes together. Send had been taken offline in July that year after sustained abuse by malware distributors and had a reason of its own. Notes had no scandal. Mozilla had laid off around 250 people the month before, roughly a quarter of the company, in a restructuring that redirected it toward products that could be sold. A free sidebar notepad did not qualify.

~ the phone version ~

Mozilla gave users six weeks and a clear instruction: export your notes before 1 November 2020. The Android app came out of the Play Store in November and the extension never shipped another build after 18 September. Sync stopped on the stated day, 1 November 2020.

The date is in two first-party places. The shipped extension carried a hardcoded expiry in its own code, and Mozilla's support article carried it in prose. That article was retired along with the product, so an archived copy of a page titled notes-status is what holds the date now.

~ what is still installed ~

The add-on was never unpublished. Version 4.3.7 is still public on addons.mozilla.org, still installable, last updated at 14:57 UTC on 18 September 2020. It shipped its final build on the same day Mozilla announced it was finished. The listing reports 18,780 average daily users.

Eighteen thousand is a strange figure to find under a service that stopped six years ago. Those browsers are loading an extension with no account layer behind it, so what they get is a plain local notepad in a panel. That is probably what most of them wanted in 2017. The sidebar still opens on command and still holds whatever was last typed into it, on that one machine and nowhere else.

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