When the clipper broke

Evernote Web Clipper stopped working

It worked for years and now it does not. The icon opens and nothing happens, or the wheel spins on “saving your clip…” until you give up. Here is what is worth checking on your side, and an honest reading of what the reviews say about how long the wait has been.

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 people report, word for word

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

What to 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 are still signed in. The clipper carries your session from the browser; when it lapses, the panel opens and the save silently never lands.
3. Check the device limit on your plan. The free tier is limited in how many devices may be connected, and a browser counts. When the limit is reached, saving fails without saying why.
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 waiting has 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. Ten years of five-star reviews 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.

A clip that is finished when you press the button

Clean 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.

• 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 never quietly replaces 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.

The two designs, side by side

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

What 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.

• Sync between machines and phones. Files land in one folder on one computer.
• Search across your whole archive, tags, saved searches and notebooks.
• Clipping email threads and simplified article view straight into a notes database.
• Screenshots and region capture. Clean 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.

If you decide to move

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

1. Install Clean 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.

Questions