QuickFox Notes – Write and Save Notes In Firefox

Regular users of Opera would vouch that the Notes feature is a very useful tool to have. A simple text capturing utility like that is handy for impromptu notes and saving scraps of text before shifting it to a more permanent location.

If you are an avid downloader like me, saving multiple download links is one offhand use. If you are a serious internet researcher and fancy something simple for quick notes, then you can gravitate between the feature rich Zotero or something much simpler.

QuickFox Notes, an add-on for Firefox is that simpler alternative to take notes in Firefox.

QuickFox Notes also integrates with Firefox Bookmarks as it uses the bookmarks folder to archive the notes. A QuickFox Notes folder gets added to your bookmark folders that stores all your notes. As a part of bookmarks, all notes can thus be easily synchronized across multiple computers if one uses a bookmark synchronization utility like Xmarks or Mozilla Weave.

The Firefox adds on just 41KB with its install. To use QuickFox Notes the first time, right-click anywhere on the Firefox toolbar and drag the QuickFox Notes icon from the Customize Toolbar window to anywhere on the browser tool strip.

Though there is no save a text snippet with a right click, copy-paste to QuickFox Notes by clicking the icon is fast enough. Left-click on the icon to open QuickFox in a separate window OR middle-click on the icon to open it in a browser tab. The shortcut is CTRL+SHIFT+F.

QuickFox Notes is similar to something like Notepad++ with its multiple tabbed look.

QuickFox may be tiny but it gives you some features that hopefully makes the ability to take notes in Firefox something more than a humdrum activity. Some customizable settings can be found under Options.

Change the background color
Quite a few options in the background color menu. I went with a sober PaleGoldenRod.

Autosave
It’s enabled by default and any note you create gets saved automatically in the bookmarks folder. The actual content of the note is stored in the description field of the bookmark.

Autocopy Selected Text
This is not enabled by default. Enabling this helps to just select the text in the note and paste it into another program without the whole right-click copy-paste routine. This is especially useful with links that we want to insert back into the browser.

These three are just some of the preliminary features that you might want to set up. QuickFox Notes has others which bear an once-over –

1. Notes can be renamed with a right-click on each note’s tab.
2. Notes can be imported from text files and exported individually, or as a bunch to a text file.
3. Notes are searchable.
4. Notes which are not used can be moved to Archive from the QuickFox Notes Archive menu or by double clicking on the tab. Moving unused notes frees up space in the interface.
5. Notes can be synchronized with Xmarks and thus accessed from anywhere (because they are stored as a bookmark folder). As they are stored as a folder, the folder can be copied and backed up elsewhere easily.
6. QuickFox Notes can also be used as a standalone application with a minor tweak. As mentioned in the FAQ -Create a Firefox shortcut – right click to get Properties. Then change the target field to: “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -chrome chrome://qfnotes/content/openEditor.xul

QuickFox Notes is a very useful add-on for those of us who are very browser-centric in our activities. Our copy-paste jobs can be saved in external Notepad files also, but it’s not too much a time saver that way. QuickFox Notes though, is.

QuickFox Notes ver.1.2G is compatible with Firefox 3+ and can downloaded from the Mozilla Add-ons page.

Do you think that QuickFox Notes is a noteworthy addition to your Firefox add-on collection? Leave a note in our comment section.