How StickyTab works, why it's private by default, and what the one-time cloud backup actually does.
You are reading a research paper or an article that gives you an idea. You open a new tab to write it down. That tab sits there for a week, gets buried under twelve others, and closes in a cleanup session you will regret by morning.
Or you paste the quote into a notes app. No link to the original. No record of which page said it. Later you spend twenty minutes hunting for the source before giving up and paraphrasing from memory.
Or you find a service that will attach notes to pages — but it wants an account, a password, and permission to read your browsing history. The note costs more than it's worth.
StickyTab exists because none of these feel right when all you want is to leave a thought on the page and find it waiting when you come back.
StickyTab is a free Firefox extension. Click the toolbar icon on any page, write your note, and close the popup. The note is saved against that page's URL in your browser's own extension storage. No server involved. Nothing leaves your machine.
The next time you visit that page, the note is right there. It survives tab closes, browser restarts, and full reboots. A small red line appears on the StickyTab icon whenever the current page has a note attached — a quiet signal that something is waiting.
You can see all your notes in one view regardless of which page they belong to. And when you need to move notes into a document, you can copy any note — or all of them at once — with their source URLs included. The references travel with the content.
Most note tools are private by policy: they collect your data but promise not to misuse it. StickyTab is private by default because the free version has no server to send anything to. There are no trackers, no analytics, no account to create. StickyTab never sees what pages you visit or what you write.
This is not a feature that could be taken away in a future update — it is just how local browser storage works.
The one limitation of local storage is that your notes stay on the device where you wrote them. If you switch computers, they don't follow automatically. For that, StickyTab has an optional Cloud Backup add-on.
Here is how it works: before your notes leave your device, they are encrypted using your license key. The server stores only ciphertext — it has no way to read your notes. To restore on another device, install StickyTab, enter the same license key, and hit Restore under Encrypted Cloud Backup in Settings. Every note comes back paired to its original page.
Backups run daily while the extension is active. The limit is 1,000 notes at 5,000 characters each, which covers most people comfortably. One license works on every device you own. It is a one-time payment of $14.99 — no subscription, no annual renewals, no price hikes. See the full plan comparison if you want to compare what is included, or read the FAQ for common questions. Refunds are available within 7 days.
Install StickyTab free from the Firefox Add-ons page. No account, no setup. Cloud backup can be enabled from Settings whenever you need it.