Obsidian Web Clipper is the official Obsidian browser extension for Chrome, Brave, Arc, Orion, Edge, Firefox, Firefox Mobile, and Safari on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS, built for Obsidian users who want what they read on the web to land in their vault as durable Markdown.

What it is

Obsidian Web Clipper is a TypeScript browser extension maintained by Obsidian and released under the MIT licence. It lives in the browser-extension ecosystem alongside the vault-based note-taking app it serves, and it is distributed through the official extension directories of each supported browser rather than through a package registry or a hosted service. The extension's job is narrow and explicit: highlight and capture web content, and store whatever is saved as durable Markdown files that can be read offline and preserved for the long term.

The concrete problem it solves is the gap between reading on the web and keeping notes. Web pages are transient and poorly suited to archiving, while a vault expects plain text. Obsidian Web Clipper bridges that gap by capturing a page or a selection from inside the browser and emitting Markdown into the vault, with templates, variables, and filters controlling the shape of the output. In place of manual copying of page content into a note by hand, the extension produces structured Markdown directly from the page being read.

Key capabilities

• Captures highlights from a page, with a documented highlighting workflow on the Obsidian Help site.
• Supports templates for the structure of a captured note, with template validation and template logic using if/for conditions landing in version 1.1.0.
• Supports variables and filters for deriving note fields from page content.
• Saves images locally, an ability that depends on Obsidian 1.8.0.
• Ships a separate extension icon as of version 1.6.3.
• Translates its interface into more languages, with translation files submitted by pull request in the /_locales folder, corresponding to /src/_locales in the repository.
• Builds three separate targets from one command: dist/ for Chromium, dist_firefox/ for Firefox, and dist_safari/ for Safari, using webextension-polyfill for browser compatibility.

Who uses it and how

• Obsidian users on Chromium-based browsers, including Chrome, Brave, Arc, and Orion, install from the Chrome Web Store and capture pages directly into their vaults.
• Firefox and Firefox Mobile users install from Firefox Add-Ons; running a local build permanently requires Nightly or Developer Firefox, where xpinstall.signatures.required is set to false and the add-on is loaded from about:addons.
• Safari users on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS install the Safari Extensions build, and reach the clipper through the Extensions button in Safari.
• Developers and contributors run npm run build, load the dist directory as an unpacked extension at chrome://extensions, or load dist_firefox/manifest.json at about:debugging#/runtime/this-firefox; iOS Simulator testing uses the Xcode project under xcode/Obsidian Web Clipper/.
• Contributors pick up work from the help wanted issue label, and translators submit locale pull requests.

Getting started

Install the extension from the official directory for the relevant browser — the Chrome Web Store, Firefox Add-Ons, Safari Extensions, or Edge Add-Ons — or download it from the Obsidian Web Clipper page. Building from source uses npm run build, and tests run with npm test or npm run test:watch.

How it compares

No comparable or competing tools are named in the project facts, and no list of paid products it replaces is provided, so on the available evidence it stands alone in this registry.

When to use it — and when not to

The extension itself requires no database, storage layer, or mail server to operate; it is a client-side browser extension, and the only external dependency for full functionality is a compatible Obsidian version, with saving images locally requiring Obsidian 1.8.0. Anyone not using Obsidian, or wanting captured pages stored somewhere other than Markdown files in a vault, should not pick it. Honest weaknesses are visible in the numbers and roadmap: 269 open issues, and roadmap items still unchecked, including cross-browser settings sync, highlight annotation, and a template directory — so settings do not follow the user between browsers today.

npm run build

npm test

npm run test:watch