How many browser tabs do you have open right now? If you're a tab addict and you want to cut down on the habit, a web clipper can be indispensable. A web clipper takes content from the web and saves a copy of it to another app. That way, you can read it or refer to it whenever you want.
The idea is similar to snipping articles from physical newspapers and magazines and saving them for later. The difference is web clippers are so much better at it, making everything you save searchable and organized. Once you clip a web page, you can close the originating tab knowing that all the information, from the content to the URL itself, is saved safely to another app.
How Do Web Clippers Work?
A web clipper is usually a feature within another app, typically note-taking apps. To use the web clipper, first you must install a browser extension for it. Then you log into your note-taking account. Finally, when you see a page you want to clip, you click the extension. If it's a really good web clipper, it will offer you options, such as clipping the main content only and omitting ads or letting you select the part of the page you want to clip.
The web clipper then saves all the page content to your note-taking app. Some clipper extensions also let you apply tags to the new resulting note or pick the folder or notebook where you want to save it. A good one also captures metadata, such as the date you clipped the article, the original URL, and so forth.
Web clippers work best with certain kinds of pages, and they don't work at all for others. Ideally, you want to clip content that's unlikely to change: recipes, feature articles, interview articles, and certain types of news stories. They typically aren't good for pages that change frequently, such as pages with sports scores, weather reports, or breaking news that reporters might update as new information becomes available. Unless of course you want to capture all the details of a page before it changes. Then, web clippers let you preserve a copy of a web page before it disappears.
The idea isn't to get rid of all your tabs, but to weed out the ones that you want to read or refer to later.
The Best Web Clippers
These five apps, listed in alphabetical order, have the best web clippers I've found.
Evernote
Evernote's web clipper is fast. When you click to save content from a page, Evernote makes a suggestion regarding how much of the page to clip and where to save it. You can override these suggestions and add more detail, too, such as tags. The clipped content syncs back to your Evernote account. When you open the saved material in Evernote, you can pull up all the metadata, including the source URL, from the note's information panel. All the content you clip into Evernote becomes searchable, too. Evernote has a free tier of service, though it's restrictive. The $7.99-per-month Premium plan offers a lot more, but you have to use the software to the fullest for it to be worth the price.
Available on Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer 7+, Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Safari
Google Keep
Google Keep's version of web clipping is a little different from others'. It only saves the URL to the page in question and a tiny preview of it. When you clip a page, however, you can add your own text to the note, assign tags, and even give the note a different title than the page. For some people, saving URLs with notes may be a better option than clipping all the content from a page. To be fair, the app isn't my cup of tea; I find it isn't as feature-rich as other note-taking apps. But there are certainly several compelling reasons to use it.
Available on Chrome
Microsoft OneNote
Microsoft OneNote is one of the very best web clippers, especially when you consider how much it lets you customize exactly what you want to clip. You can save a whole page, a part you select, just the URL, or the simplified page with ads and extraneous stuff stripped out whenever OneNote identifies the page type. In the image above, for example, it has identified a recipe. You can also add highlights to the page before you clip it, as well as tags and a notebook designation. OneNote is free to use, making it an attractive option.
Available on Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge
Pocket is one of the most well known apps for reading. It was designed to help people save content offline to read later. It works very similarly to note-taking apps, only you can make other kinds of notes with it; you can only clip web content. One neat feature in Pocket is the ability to explore suggested articles, so if you're out of articles to read, you can always find something in this app.
Available for Chrome, Firefox (it's built into the browser), Microsoft Edge, Opera, and Safari
Zoho Notebook
Zoho Notebook has a swift little web clipper that gives you a lot of flexibility in what you save. You can pop open a pared-down version of the page and clip that, or highlight the text you want to add into a note. If you leave this view on screen, you can adjust the text size and typeface. You can also drag and drop images into your note and choose the notebook where the finished product should go. Zoho Notebook is entirely free. Zoho is a company that sells cloud-based software as a service for dozens of business uses, and the Notebook app is a freebie that, the company hopes, might draw you into its other paid apps.
Available on Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Safari
More Advice on Cleaning Up Your Tabs
PCMag has more tips on working with tabs (in Chrome). Be sure to master the basics first. From there, be sure you aren't overlooking other great tricks for managing tabs, such as dragging multiple tabs at once out of the main window.