Under the hood
How it works, and where it stops
Nothing here is magic and nothing calls a server. The whole pipeline runs in the page you are looking at, in a few dozen milliseconds.
Finding the article
First the extension looks for the obvious containers an article usually lives in. When there is no such container – and on a lot of real sites there is not – it falls back to measuring text density: which block holds the most paragraph text that is not inside a link. The narrowest block that still holds almost all of that text wins.
A block whose text is mostly link labels is a menu or a feed, not an article, and it is rejected – unless it holds more than about 1200 characters of real text, because long articles legitimately contain many links.
Removing the furniture
Then the known non-content elements go: navigation, banners, share bars, cookie notices, paginators, “read next” feeds and logo strips. Repeated lines are removed, because navigation duplicated in every section is the single biggest source of noise in a clipped page.
what other clippers keep
[Skip to content](#main) [Log in](/login) [Sign up](/register) [Home](/) [News](/news) [Sport](/sport) [Culture](/culture) [More](/more) We use cookies and similar technologies to improve your experience. [Accept all] [Manage preferences] # The article you came for Actual first paragraph of the text. <div class="promo-inline"> ## Read next [Another headline](/a) [One more headline](/b) [And a third](/c)
what ends up in the note
# The article you came for Actual first paragraph of the text.
Converting
Tables are serialised by the extension itself rather than a generic plugin, because generic converters break on a cell containing a list or a code block. Code fences take the language from the page’s own markup. Reference links are collected into Markdown footnotes before the sanitiser strips the ids they rely on – the order matters, and getting it wrong silently loses every footnote.
Where it stops
On a storefront, a feed or a search result there is no article. The extension checks the finished Markdown – if more than a quarter of it sits inside link labels, it reports “no article” rather than handing you three hundred links. That refusal is deliberate, and it is why the character counts here are lower than tools that always return something.
What it does not do
- It does not download images, video or other binary assets – image links point at the original site
- It does not crawl – one page at a time, the page you are on
- It does not summarise or rewrite – the article text is converted, not edited
- It does not run on pages the browser protects, such as
chrome://and the extension store itself