Frequently Asked Questions

You can configure Page Notes to automatically show notes for a web page by changing the “Automatically show notes pop-up” setting in the options page. There are 3 possible values of this setting:

Page Notes can be opened in the browser’s side panel instead of a popup. The side panel stays open as you browse, automatically updating to show notes for the current tab.

You can always open the side panel by right-clicking the Page Notes extension icon and selecting “Open Side Panel”. If you’d like the side panel to be the default way you open and edit notes, instead of the popup, go to Page Notes settings and change “Open notes in” to “Side Panel”.

Note: The side panel feature is not available on Firefox as Firefox does not support the side panel API.

Note: YouTube URLs are always handled correctly regardless of this setting. Page Notes automatically normalizes YouTube URLs to ensure notes are saved and retrieved consistently.

You can configure Page Notes to ignore certain parts of the URL, e.g. query parameters and hash, while saving and retrieving notes by changing the “Ignore in URL” setting in the options page. This setting has 3 possible values:

You can configure a default value for this setting as well as add site-specific overrides. For example, you can set the default ignore-in-url value to “Query parameters & hash” and add an override for sites that use query parameters, e.g. youtube.com to “Hash”.

Site-level notes are applied to all pages with the same hostname. For example, if you add a site-level note for github.com, that note will apply to all pages on github.com, including https://github.com/manugarg/pagenotes-issues, for example. If a page has both page-level and site-level notes, the page-level notes take priority.

You can mark a note as site-level when you edit it. You can also change the default setting through the options page.

Page Notes comes with three:

• Alt + P — open Page Notes on the page you are looking at
• Alt + O — open All Notes
• Alt + S — toggle the side panel

If one of them does nothing, your browser has already given that combination to something else. A shortcut an extension asks for is a suggestion, not a reservation: if the combination is already taken — by the browser itself, or by another extension you installed earlier — the command simply arrives unassigned. Nothing is broken, and the extension has no way to tell that it happened.

You can see which ones are assigned, and change any of them:

• Chrome and other Chromium browsers — go to chrome://extensions/shortcuts (edge://extensions/shortcuts on Edge), find Page Notes, click the box beside the command you want and press your combination.
• Firefox — open about:addons, click the gear icon at the top right, and choose Manage Extension Shortcuts.

The page shows you when a combination is already in use, so you will know before you commit to one.

You can also set a shortcut for a command that has none, or clear one you would rather not have. Page Notes works the same either way; the shortcuts only save you a click on the toolbar icon.

Page Notes can lock a note so that it stays visible but can’t be edited until you unlock it. It’s meant for notes you open and read often and don’t want to change by mistake — an address, a set of credentials-adjacent details, a reference you keep coming back to.

Locking is off by default. To turn it on, open the Page Notes options page, click “Advanced Settings” near the bottom of the Settings card, and enable “Allow locking notes”.

Once it’s enabled, a lock button appears next to the Edit button when you view a note in the popup or the side panel:

• An open lock means the note is editable. Click it to lock the note.
• An amber closed lock means the note is locked. The Edit button is greyed out and clicking the note no longer starts an edit. Click the lock again to unlock it.

A few things worth knowing:

• The lock travels with the note, so it syncs to your other devices. If a locked note arrives on a device where you have never touched this setting, Page Notes turns the setting on there for you so the lock is honoured rather than silently ignored.
• The lock guards the popup and the side panel, which is where notes are normally read and edited. The All Notes page is the management view you go to deliberately, so it doesn’t block anything there — you can edit and delete as usual, and editing a locked note there keeps its lock rather than removing it. The web app at pagenotes.app doesn’t enforce the lock either.
• Locking is not encryption, and it is not a security feature. A locked note is stored exactly like any other note — the lock only stops an accidental edit. If you want a note to be unreadable without a passphrase, use the encryption option instead.
• Turning the setting back off hides the lock UI and lets you edit everything again. Your notes keep their lock flags, so they come back locked if you turn it on again.

You can back up your page notes from the options page. The backup is saved to disk in CSV format. You can also restore notes from a backup from the same, options, page.

Extension will automatically switch to dark mode icons if you change OS settings to dark mode. You can change this behavior by changing the ‘Use dark mode icons’ setting:

If you use Google Drive sync, Google Drive keeps up to 100 previous versions of your notes file. You can use this to recover lost or overwritten notes.

1. Open pagenotes.data in Google Drive.

2. Click the context menu (three dots on the right side):

   

3. Select File Information → Manage Versions.

4. Pick the version you’d like to restore. Versions are listed by date and number, with the most recent first.

5. Click the three-dot menu next to that version and select Keep forever. This is required before Google Drive will let you download it.

6. Click the three-dot menu again and select Download.

7. Go to the Page Notes options page and use the Restore option to import the downloaded file.

If you run into any issues, please open an issue.

Yes, you can easily disable icon animation and ‘blue’ badge from the options page.

If sync to Google Drive stops working after being set up correctly and working well at least once, extension’s badge icon will become red to indicate that.

If you’re not connected to the internet, for example working offline on a plane, you can just ignore the red signal. If you’re connected to the internet, you should look at the debug info on the options page to figure out what’s wrong.

If you see a message like this:

Error: Error while refreshing access token! Status: 400

Your refresh token has become invalid for some reason – for example, you might have revoked the permission in Google account accidentally, or the refresh token itself might have expired if not used for a really long time.

The best way to resolve this, and in fact most sync errors, is to just setup sync again. You can do that by clicking on ‘Stop Sync’ and then ‘Setup Sync’ in the options page. It’s an entirely safe operation, but I’d still recommend to take the backup of local notes first, just to be super sure.

If setting up sync (from the options page) fails, take a look at the debug info to find the error message.

If you see a message like this:

Error: The user turned off browser signin

It typically means you’re using a non-Chrome browser, and extension was not able to determine that automatically and tried to use Chrome specific auth mechanism (i.e. chrome.identity API). These days more and more browsers imitate Google Chrome making it almost impossible to tell them apart programmatically. As a workaround, Page Notes provides an option to force non-Chrome behavior for sync authorization in the ‘Advanced Settings’.