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Web Clipper performance issues


rmloveland

Idea

Hello Evernote pals!  First post here.  Pretty happy Premium user.

Experiencing a few issues with Web Clipper.  In roughly descending order of importance (to me of course :-) )

tl;dr: In 2017, I need <1s clip speed, near-perfect page parsing (preferably using the *already locally parsed and downloaded content*), and no changes in scroll position of the page should *ever* happen when I click the Clip button.

1. Speed.  Clipper needs to be fast and it just isn't.  RIght now Pinboard and Pocket are absolutely blowing it out of the water on Firefox on a reasonably quick 2014 rMBP with 8 GB RAM.  Pocket may have some advantages due to being "built in" with native code, but as far as I can tell both services are hitting backend servers to do the actual clipping and saving (of course, please correct me if I'm wrong - and that brings its own issues - see #2 below).  In any case, I consider the Clipper's speed to be so poor as to be a usability bug.  Since I started playing with Pocket recently, clicking on the elephant and waiting for that slow, lumbering spinner of doom while it loads up whatever and talks to whatever is something I have begun to dread.  This is too bad since Evernote is quickly becoming my "system of record" / "external brain", as it has for many others here I'd imagine.  The performance issue is especially difficult to tolerate as a user given that it's a paid service, and the output of the clips is not always outstanding (and in some cases quite poor actually - see #2 below).

2. Clip Quality. Clipper doesn't do a *great* job with a lot of web pages.  I've done a bit of a "bake off" with Pocket and also the Mercury Chrome extension, and found Clipper to be left somewhat wanting - esp. considering that it's attached to a paid product.  In a few cases it just barfs on a page that Pocket or Mercury can parse and display just fine.  More to the point, I've deduced that it must talk to a backend server that does the actual fetching and parsing, since I've clipped a page on a site that I'm viewing just fine in my browser (e.g. a NYT page), only to go to my Evernote later and find that it clipped the partial page with the "you've hit 10 articles" or whatever warning, making the clip effectively useless.  And there's no way to know that a clip "went bad" except by checking my Evernote compulsively, which is ... kind of defeating the point of computers. This is especially annoying considering that I've already downloaded the content locally, with access to the entire page and all images, etc., only to have the article clip extremely poorly because (apparently?) the client is not actually driving the clipping, but some backend service.

3. One Really Serious UX issue: When I clip a page, it jumps back up to the top of the page from where I am.  Especially when I'm partway through a long article, this is *extremely* disorienting because I lose my place.  Nothing software does should change the user's position on a page, or jump the UI around in a janky way without the user's input..

Evernote PMs, I don't know if y'all are reading these forums, but: please think about prioritizing the Clipper.  I use Evernote in large part because I want an external brain where I save things I read on the web.  If it isn't "a darn near perfect clip, in less than a second, every single time", it's making me think about its existence, in which case it's not necessarily solving a problem for me but creating one.  I would *love* to be delighted by the Clipper instead of ranging from the best-case "it's OK I guess, but I dread clicking because it's going to hang for 3 seconds and possibly lose my place in the article" to the worse "why doesn't this work as well as Pocket, it didn't clip my page correctly at all, nooooo".

I love Evernote.  It's very very good, and I want it to be amazing.  I know y'all are working hard and have a lot of various codebases to maintain, and probably not enough people to do it all to the level you'd like.  So I'll close by saying: thanks for your hard work, and thanks for listening.

 

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I have several items for feedback but because this was specific to the WEBCLIPPER and rmloveland already covered most points I limit this post to the WebClipping...I agree that the timing of clip speed is too slow and losing place when clipping is rather Annoying and also a waste of time.

It would also be great if the WebClipper would remember the last Notebook and Tag set utilized for Clipping or if we could set a set of tags and notebook for a specified time period and then it would return to default settings.  This way when doing specific research for a period of time isn't wasted by selecting the Clip Settings, Tags and Notebook for each clip.

I love evernote as much as Tim Ferris does  (self-proclaimed compulsive Notetake, Author and Series A Investor in Evernote)  Thank you for the Hard work and continuous improvement to your product.  Hopefully you continue to outrun the Google Keeps and Microsoft OneNotes out there!!

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