Apparently, Chrome developers have been working on it for months, but it is now that the first images of one of the most striking Chrome features yet to come have been shown: notes. Yes, we talked about that you can take notes in chromeas you already do, for example, in Vivaldi.
As with other Chrome features, this note will initially not be anything out of the ordinary. It will not reach the level of Vivaldi, to continue with the example, but it is worth remembering that this is a feature in early development (it cannot even be tested yet open in the unstable version of the browser) and even so, it has points that exceed , again, seen in Vivaldi.
I mention Vivaldi as a reference, because although the integration between note applications and web browsers goes back a long way, theirs is currently the most advanced implementation… if not the only one as such, that is, as a note application. Opera had its thing in the past and today it supplements it in a certain way with its Pinboards, Microsoft Edge does something similar with its Collections… and Firefox discarded the invention for no good reason.
The notes in Vivaldi are another story
So regardless of whether you use a note service like Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, etc., integrated notes app as native function in the browser itself, Vivaldi has it and… in a future that we hope will be near, Chrome. Chrome yes. The minimalist web browser that turns power into virtue, and that little by little adds all kinds of features, most likely dragged along by the push of its competition.
Total, that Chrome will have its function to take notes and from what has been seen, it will be interesting. Like Vivaldi, it will show notes saved in a side panel (the same one that already shows the bookmarks or the reading list), although in a slightly more rudimentary way, if we judge it by what has been seen, so it could vary by the time it is released to the general public.
How will notes be taken? In that it does differ a bit from Vivaldi, because at the moment you can’t take a note from scratch, but you do it through the context menu, on a selected page, image or text. We could even call it «marker-notes», since they work as such and by clicking on them, the page from which they come is opened. It’s similar to how web annotation extensions work.
In fact, it also works the other way around: when the user enters a page where they have annotation made, the side panel will open automatically and the selected text will be highlighted, although for the final version they wait, as mentioned in the Chromium development site, make the behavior customizable.
Be that as it may, beyond the details about its operation, what is interesting is the functionality itself, being able to take notes in Chrome. For what it means -Chrome integrating functions of this type, for so long outside the idiosyncrasies of the browser- and for users who appreciate this class of productivity tools.
The question is… why don’t they just stop people from putting whatever they want on that side panel? It is that you anchor Google Keep there, as you can already do in other browsers, and why do you want more. After all, since Google is going to save your notes, the service deserves it. In case you use it for more than just taking web annotations, wow.
