When the clipper broke · Checked September 2026 · Updated 16 September 2026 · By Evgeny K.

Evernote Web Clipper stopped working

Evernote Web Clipper stopped working after years of doing its job: the icon opens and nothing happens, or the wheel spins on “saving your clip…” until you give up. Below: what to check on your side, what the reviews say about the wait, and Clean Web Clipper, whose clip is finished when you press the button.

What are the three shapes this takes?

The clip hangs. The panel opens, you press save, and the spinner runs forever. The clip has been handed to Evernote's service and the confirmation never comes back, so you cannot tell whether it saved.

The icon does nothing. Clicking it opens no panel at all. This is usually the extension failing to attach to a tab that was already open when the extension was installed, updated or reloaded, and it is the one shape you can often fix yourself in a second.

It saves, but into the wrong place, or into a notebook you are not looking at. This is not a bug, and it is the reason a clip sometimes seems lost when it is not.

What do people report, word for word?

Chrome Web Store reviews, unedited. Note the dates: this is not a single bad release.

What should you try, in order?

The first two take seconds and cover the most common cause. The rest narrow the problem down to your account, your browser or the service.

1. Reload the page and click again. An extension cannot reach into a tab that was already open when it was installed or updated. This alone explains a lot of dead icons and costs nothing to rule out.
2. Open evernote.com in the same browser and check you can still sign in. The clipper saves into your Evernote account, as its store listing says, so if the account itself cannot be reached, no clip will land either.
3. Check your plan and the devices signed in to it. Evernote’s plan comparison lists 1 device on Free, 3 on Starter and unlimited on Advanced (checked 16 September 2026). Whether that limit touches the clipper is for Evernote support to confirm; the page does not say.
4. Look inside the notebook before deciding the clip is lost. A clip that seemed to hang has often arrived already, and clipping it again just gives you two.
5. Disable other extensions and try once. Content blockers and privacy extensions can block the request the clipper makes at the moment of saving.
6. Try in a guest window. If it works there, the problem is in your profile; if it fails there too, the problem is on the service side and no local fix reaches it.

Why has waiting not worked?

The reviews below span 2024. Some of them describe the failure as already months old at the time of writing, and the pattern in the ratings supports that reading rather than a one-off outage.

The card carries 4.73 stars, which is what you see before installing. The last hundred reviews average 2.49, and 62 % of them are one or two stars (Chrome Web Store reviews, snapshot of 5 September 2026). The card has been in the store since 2009, and 129 105 ratings in total are averaging out the current state, so the visible rating tells you what the extension used to be, not what it is now.

The underlying reason is the same one every hosted clipper has: the clip is not finished when you press the button. It is finished when a server somewhere accepts it. Every part of that path can fail, and none of it is under your control.

Get a clip that is finished when you press the button

Clean Web Clipper writes the file and stops. There is no upload, no confirmation to wait for, and no spinner that can run forever, because there is no second machine involved. The extraction itself is measured on 512 pages.

• No account and no session, so nothing lapses and nothing has to be renewed.
• The note is a .md file in a folder you chose. You can see it in the file manager a second later.
• No device limit, no plan, no page count. All of it is free.
• Works on pages behind your own login, because it reads the tab you are looking at.
• If the name is taken, the file becomes Article-2.md, so a second clip does not replace the first.
• The settings page counts how many times you pressed the button and how many notes came out, so a silent gap between the two is visible instead of invisible.

How do the two designs compare, side by side?

A comparison of construction, not of quality. Evernote does a great deal that Clean Web Clipper does not, and the next section lists it.

What do you give up by switching?

Evernote is a notes system; this is a converter that writes files. If any of the following is why you use the clipper, keep using it.

What Evernote does is taken from its Chrome Web Store listing (snapshot of 5 September 2026) and plan page (checked 16 September 2026).

• Sync across devices. Files land in one folder on one computer.
• Tags, notebooks and search across your whole account.
• Clipping PDFs and saving a page as a bookmark with its URL, images and description.
• Screenshots, full-page or of just the part you want, with highlights, text and other annotations. Clean Web Clipper writes text, not images of pages.
• Anything to do with your existing Evernote archive. This extension does not read it, import it or convert it.

How do you move, if you decide to?

None of this requires the old clipper to be working again first.

1. Install Clean Web Clipper and pick a folder in its settings.
2. Clip one page and open the resulting file. Decide from the actual output, not from a description of it.
3. If you use Obsidian, point the folder at the vault. The file appears there whether Obsidian is running or not.
4. Leave Evernote installed while you decide. The two do not interfere with each other.
5. Export your existing notes through Evernote itself if you want them out. That is a separate job and this extension has no part in it.

Why does the spinner keep happening?

Is the Evernote clipper broken for everyone? The Evernote clipper is not broken for everyone, and plenty of people still use it. What the data shows is a long tail of failures that has not been cleared: 62 % of the last hundred reviews are one or two stars, against a lifetime average of 4.73 (Chrome Web Store reviews, snapshot of 5 September 2026).

What does Clean Web Clipper offer instead?

Can Clean Web Clipper import my Evernote notes? Clean Web Clipper does not import Evernote notes: it clips web pages and nothing else. Existing notes come out through Evernote's own export.