FreelyMemo: A Floating Notepad Browser Extension for Any Web Page

You're reading something — a Stripe dashboard, a YouTube video, a 12,000-word essay — and a thought shows up that you don't want to lose. The usual move is to open a new tab, find your notes app, click in, type, and find your way back. By the time you're back, half the thought is gone. A floating notepad browser extension fixes exactly this: it puts a notepad on the page you're already looking at, so the thought never has to survive a tab switch.

That's what FreelyMemo does, and it does one thing: it puts a pad on your current tab in about as long as it takes to press a key combo.

One shortcut, any tab

Press ⌘⇧O on a Mac, or Ctrl+Shift+O on Windows and Linux, and a small notepad appears right on top of the page you're on. Press it again to hide the pad. There's no new tab, no separate window, no app-switcher dance — the pad just shows up where your cursor already is.

Because it's a browser extension rather than a website, it works the same way on every tab: a checkout page, a spreadsheet, a video call in the browser, a long article. You don't need to remember which app has your notes in it. You need to remember one shortcut.

No setup between you and your first note

There's no account to create and no onboarding flow. Chromium-based browsers — Chrome, Brave, Edge, Arc — install it from the Chrome Web Store; Firefox has its own version through Firefox Add-ons. Either way, once it's installed, press the shortcut and start typing. Everything you write saves automatically as you go — there's no explicit "save" step to forget.

The pad also survives things that would normally wipe out a scratch note: closing the tab, closing the browser, restarting your laptop, closing dozens of other tabs in between. Come back later, press the shortcut again, and your notes are exactly where you left them, in the same tab you last had them in.

Why a floating notepad browser extension beats another app

The appeal of a floating notepad isn't that it does more than a full notes app — it's that it does less, on purpose. There's no folder tree to organize, no 17-button toolbar, no sync settings to configure before you can type a sentence. It's a pad that shows up when you need it and gets out of the way when you don't, because pressing the shortcut a second time hides it again.

That focus also means it doesn't compete with whatever notes system you already use for long-term storage. Think of it as the fast capture layer that sits between "I just thought of something" and wherever that thought eventually needs to live — a task tracker, a document, an email.

A practical example

Say you're comparing three vendor quotes across three browser tabs. Instead of alt-tabbing to a notes app for each one, you press the shortcut on tab one, jot the price and terms, hide the pad, switch to tab two, press the shortcut again, and keep going. The pad remembers separate content per note, so nothing gets overwritten — you're just capturing thoughts at the speed you're already reading.

If you want to organize those captures instead of leaving them all in one note, color-coded tabs inside the pad let you split work, ideas, and reading into separate spaces — see clipping text into color-coded notes for how that works.

Try it before you decide

FreelyMemo is free to try for 7 days with the full feature set unlocked, no credit card and no account required. If you want to keep it after that, it's a one-time $10 payment — not a subscription — covering both Chrome and Firefox. Details are on the pricing page.

Add it to your browser, press ⌘⇧O on whatever tab you have open right now, and see how it feels to never lose a thought to a tab switch again.