Web clipper
The clipper is a browser extension that saves what you are reading into Smritsavant. It works in Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi, Opera and their relatives; on macOS, Safari’s version ships inside the app itself.
Installing it
Open Settings → Integrations in the app. Every browser installed on your computer is listed there, with a button that takes you to its extension page — the app cannot install an extension for you, because browsers reserve that click for you, but it can get you to the right page in the right browser.
The app has to be open at least once before a browser can talk to it. If the extension says “open Smritsavant once to finish setup”, that is what it means: the app registers itself with each browser on launch.
Three ways to clip
| Clip article | The readable page, cleaned up — the article without the navigation, the share bar or the comment thread. |
| Clip selection | Only what you have highlighted. |
| Save bookmark | The title and the link, nothing else. |
Whichever you pick, nothing is saved yet. The extension shows you what it read, and the title and the text are both editable before you commit. You also choose which canvas the note lands on.
What comes with the page
Pictures are downloaded, not linked. A note that points at someone else’s images breaks when they reorganise their site; a note that owns them does not. They are also described on your device, which is what makes a picture findable months later by what is in it rather than by its filename. How many to take per clip is yours to set in Settings → Integrations — the default is 60, and it exists as a setting so that a page with a hundred images does not quietly lose most of them without saying so.
Videos become cards. They are not downloaded — a single clip can be gigabytes and there is nothing useful to be said about it — but they are not lost either. Each becomes a card with the video’s thumbnail that opens in your browser when clicked. Deliberately not an embedded player: an embed would contact YouTube every time you so much as opened the note, which is not a thing a note should do.
A summary, if you have a model. With a local model configured, a short summary is written at the top of the clip. It runs on your device, and it waits its turn behind the image descriptions rather than competing with them for the GPU.
What the extension can see
Three permissions, and no host permissions at all — it holds no standing access to any site:
- activeTab — the tab you clicked the button on, at the moment you click. It cannot read a page in the background, and it cannot read a page you have not asked it to.
- scripting — the capture runs inside the page, because the rendered page is the only place images that load lazily and articles drawn by a widget actually exist.
- nativeMessaging — hands the result to the app on the same computer.
That last one is the important one: it is the permission that keeps a clip local. The extension makes no network requests of any kind — there is no server behind it, and none of it reaches us. See the clipper privacy policy for the full statement.
When a page will not clip
Some pages cannot be read by an extension at all — a browser’s own settings pages, the extension gallery, and PDF viewers. Save bookmark still works on those.
Where an article is genuinely there but the reader misses it, Clip selection is the reliable fallback: highlight what you want and clip that instead.