What is the best browser extension for highlighting PDFs specifically?

Web Highlights and Weava both handle PDFs well, including PDFs opened directly in the browser rather than a separate viewer. Hypothesis is the strongest free option if your PDFs are academic papers you want to annotate collaboratively.

Are my highlights private with these extensions?

It depends on the tool, and this is the detail to check before you commit to one. Web Highlights, Weava, and Raindrop.io are private by default. Glasp's free tier is public by default — private highlights require the Pro plan. Hypothesis lets you choose per-annotation.

Can I export my highlights to Notion or Obsidian?

Glasp natively pushes highlights to Obsidian, Notion, and Roam, which makes it the strongest option if you already maintain a second-brain system in one of those tools. Most of the others store highlights in-app and offer more limited or manual export.

Do any of these extensions help me actually remember what I highlighted?

Not directly. They're built to capture and organize, not to test recall. If retention is the actual goal — as opposed to having a searchable archive — pairing your capture tool with active recall practice closes that gap. --- *Capturing highlights from web articles is only half the job — Chapterly turns what you highlight and read into AI-driven discussion and spaced-repetition review, so it actually sticks. Try it free.*

5 Best Browser Extensions for Highlighting and Annotating Articles (2026)

5 Best Browser Extensions for Highlighting and Annotating Articles (2026) Quick Answer: The best browser extensions for highlighting articles in 2026 are Web Highlights (best for private-by-default highlighting across web pages and PDFs), Glasp (best free tier, if you're comfortable with public highlights), Weava (best for research organized into folders), Raindrop.io (best if you already use it to save links), and Hypothesis (best free, open-source option for academic and long-form reading). None of them test whether you actually remember what you highlighted — that's a separate problem, and one worth solving with a different kind of tool. If you read a lot on the web — long-form journalism, research papers, newsletters, product docs — you've probably hit the same wall as Kindle and Apple Books readers: the good stuff you highlight while reading has nowhere to live. It sits in a right-click "copy" clipboard, or in a browser tab you'll never reopen, or nowhere at all. A highlighter extension fixes the capture problem. It does not fix the remembering problem, which is a different tool's job — more on that at the end. This guide compares the extensions worth installing in 2026, based on three things that actually differ between...