Finding useful information online is easy. Keeping track of it is not. Bookmarks pile up in folders you never open. Screenshots scatter across your downloads. Browser history turns into an unsearchable mess. Before long, you lose the brilliant ideas, tutorials, and solutions you found weeks ago.

Web Highlights solves that problem. This Chrome extension lets you highlight text on any webpage and keeps all your highlights searchable and organized in one place. No more lost bookmarks. No more hunting through history. Everything you highlight becomes instantly findable. You can tag highlights, add notes, and search across your entire library. It’s simple, frictionless, and essential to how I research and write. Whether you’re gathering references for a project, saving coding solutions, or collecting ideas for articles, Web Highlights keeps everything you find accessible when you need it.

Zero setup, instant highlighting

Install it and start highlighting immediately

Web Highlights is a browser extension that saves and organizes text highlights from any webpage. Instead of bookmarking or taking screenshots, you can annotate key passages directly, and the tool keeps them neatly stored and searchable. It’s lightweight, private, and keeps your data local unless you choose to sync online. The extension doesn’t require an account—just install it and start highlighting right away.

While there are many online highlighter extensions that let you annotate web pages and save notes, I still prefer using Web Highlights for its search capabilities and offline-first approach.

To start saving passages, I simply select text on a webpage, hover over the highlighter icon to choose a color, and that’s it. The highlight is saved and ready to view later.

But since I want my notes to be easily searchable, I also add tags to them. After highlighting a piece of text, I simply click on it again and add as many tags as I need. I sometimes include extra notes as well if the highlight needs more context.

To view my saves, I click the Web Highlights icon in the top-right corner. This opens a sidebar on the left where I can browse and manage all my highlights.

One of my favorite features in Web Highlights is that every highlight has a local copy. This lets me view all my saves and their source web pages, even when I’m offline.

And of course, if I need to look for specific saved highlights, I can use the search bar in the sidebar to search by keywords or filter by tags.

I usually keep Web Highlights at its default settings, but if you want to customize the interface, you can easily do that from the settings menu.

Overall, I enjoy using Web Highlights for its simplicity, searchable highlights, offline access, and convenient Markdown exports.

The problem with Web Highlights

Cloud sync isn’t free

Now, there’s one thing worth mentioning about Web Highlights. The free offline mode is fantastic, but if you want cloud syncing across your devices, it costs money. You get a 7-day free trial when you create an account, but once the trial ends, Premium costs $4.49 per month. Unlike some competitors that include cloud sync for free, Web Highlights requires a subscription to keep your highlights synced across your phone, tablet, and computers.

For some people, that’s a dealbreaker. If you need your research accessible everywhere right away without thinking about it, the free trial won’t be enough.

Of course, having to pay for sync isn’t unique to Web Highlights. For example, Glasp lets you highlight and save quotes for free but requires a $10-per-month subscription for Premium. Some competitors offer free cloud sync but may charge for advanced features, making Web Highlights Premium, at $4.49 per month, comparatively affordable.

I actually don’t mind skipping premium

The Markdown export is good enough

Web Highlights Premium offers automatic syncing across devices, but I’ve found that manually exporting in Markdown works just as well. Since I already use Notion for writing and research, which syncs for free across all my devices, I get essentially the same benefit without paying for Premium.

All I do is click the three-dot menu on any highlighted webpage, select Copy Markdown, and paste it into Notion. The highlights, tags, notes, and source links all come perfectly formatted. Even images include thumbnails, and since it’s Markdown, everything stays organized and easy to read.

In just a few seconds, my highlights are stored in Notion and synced automatically across all my devices. No subscription required.

While I don’t use Notion for my entire workflow anymore, I think just being able to freely sync your important highlights across your devices makes it worth installing.

Ideas don’t disappear anymore

I’ve built a habit now. Something interesting appears; I highlight it. Halfway through a tutorial that matters for a project, I save the key parts. An argument I want to reference later, highlighted and tagged. My Obsidian vault is now filled with properly structured research that feeds directly into my writing. My highlights actually become actionable. My second brain has memory. The best tools don’t announce themselves. They don’t interrupt your flow. They don’t add friction. Web Highlights just becomes part of how you read online. Try it for one week. Highlight everything interesting. You’ll understand why I can’t imagine working without it now.