Today, we’re introducing Obsidian Web Clipper a new extension that helps you highlight and capture the web in your favorite browser. Anything you save is stored as durable Markdown files that you can read offline, and preserve for the long term.
Web Clipper makes it easy to shape Obsidian into a recipe book, a personal movie database, a travel planner, or read-it-later inbox. It turns your favorite browser into a sharper tool.
Web Clipper is available for all major browsers on desktop and mobile, including Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Brave, Arc, Orion, and many more. It’s also open source under the MIT license.
Why?
With Web Clipper we set out to solve three problems:
Take control of your archives. The web is an increasingly unpredictable place. Web pages cannot be relied on as durable references. Information changes, pages move behind paywalls, and over time links rot and lead to 404s.
Bridge the gap between research and thought. So much of our research process takes place in the browser — but browsers are primarily designed for reading and viewing rather than writing and thinking. It should be easy to highlight, annotate, and capture web content that can be referenced and expanded upon in your notes.
Connect your personal knowledge to structured world knowledge. The web contains a treasure trove of metadata about everything from people to places, books, media, etc, which can be stored in Obsidian using properties. It should be easy to capture that data and make references in your notes more useful.
Private, malleable, durable
Following the principles in our Manifesto, Obsidian Web Clipper is private, easily customizable, and designed around the long-term durability of your notes.
- Your data is not collected, and we do not gather usage metrics. The code is open source, auditable, and MIT licensed.
- You can customize how content is saved based on the website with powerful templates that can be easily shared.
- Your clips are saved to durable files with smart rules that convert complex HTML content to plain text, including tables, code blocks, footnotes, and math equations.
We hope you give it a try! Download Obsidian Web Clipper for your favorite browser.
You can also explore the Web Clipper documentation, and join the official Discord channel to see how people are using it.