@Vlad I get the impression that I stepped on your toes with my question and that these kinds of questions annoy you. Could it be that since the process after a report is like a black box, which I can understand if there are only two devs, that people just ask a question because they are curious about the state of affairs?
25
Readwise Highlighter extension (both Chrome and Firefox) doesn't work
- Edited
janpeeters I value your contribution. Here is how things look from my perspective:
State of affairs is indicated on the thread and it is "Under review"> Almost every extension issue is under review because we in general do not solve problems extension by extensions (unless they are hugely popular extensions) but wait for the proper API support to land in Orion
It is part of my job to read every comment on this website and to reply to them. I have made over 5,000 replies on this website already, you can imagine how much time that has taken and amount of context switching it requires. How many CEOs you know who do that?
If everybody suddenly decided to ask about the state of affairs for every post I would be facing several thousand new messages to see and reply to every week (it is a few hundred weekly currently)
Thus it is important to me to convey what I did above, otherwise things would start to fall apart and this forum would become useless
It is currently definetely not useless as the issues get prioritized (based on upvotes, impact to entire user base and complexity), and the flow of tickets is transparent and evident by the release notes
Sorry if it sounded rude, after you do this so many times, there is very little empathy left in the tank
@Vlad thanks for clarifying your perspective. Makes things clear. And I, of course, appreciate your work. And no offense taken by your reply after reading this.
What I didn't know is the two devs situation and that you don't fix extensions on an extension by extension way. Logical, of course, but I didn't realize that. That clarifies why some extensions take longer to get working.
Because two (for me) essential extensions don't work, I see myself using Arc more and more. That's not something I really fancy because Orion still is my favorite browser. I love its philosophy, privacy and clean design. But my productivity also needs to stay up. My inquiry was part of my wish to be able to use Orion for those activities like saving content to Readwise and Obsidian as well.
I'll keep my eye on the statuses and will not bother you with inquiries. You're right, that just creates an extra workload for you, and energy drain. And that is not my intention.
I could imagine the endeavor to get Chrome and Firefox extensions working in a WebKit browser can sometimes feel like an endless stream of issues.
Thanks again, best, Jan
4 months later
Just wanted to chime in and let anyone who finds this know that the extension is now working on Orion 0.99
I installed the Firefox version of the Readwise Highlighter app directly from the store page and it works for me, including the in-page highlighting context menus saved back to Readwise.
Here is the firefox extension link:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readwise-highlighter/
Not sure if it was work that Readwise did or that the Orion team did, but either way it got fixed by someone. Both apps (Readwise Read and Orion Browser) are beta products. So it isn't terribly surprising that there were hiccups. But either way, it works now!
(At least the Firefox one does, i never tried Chrome and try to avoid that store if possible)
Happy highlighting!
@jacurtis That's great news. Thanks a lot for the reporting back!
Also heads up to everyone, for whatever reason, the plugin extension didn't work with any tabs that were opened prior to the install of the extension. I would get the reload tab message, and reloading would just have it ask again.
The solution that worked is to just close the tab, open the same website up in a new tab and now it would work. I replicated this a few times and it seems that no matter how times you reload or navigate around, any tabs that were open before I installed the extension didn't work until I closed them, then it worked ever since.
So my advice is to just restart the browser after installing the extension. With a fresh browser, then all the tabs will recognize the extension and have worked for me ever since. I have tested it on about 25 or so different websites and so far it has worked on everything after the browser restart. And it has worked across multiple restarts too.
a month later
a year later
There's a regression with the Readwise Highlighter extension. The Chrome version doesn't work at all, clicking the icon does nothing. The Firefox version shows a notification 'reload the tab', but reloading the tab doesn't make it capture the page.
Thanks for having a look at this. I use it a a lot and have to revert to another browser because of this.
Jan
janpeeters It may not be a regression, but the extension adding new features or extensions APIs we do not support yet. have you tried with the same version that was active at the time this was marked as done?
- Edited
@Vlad Good point, but after researching your remark the Firefox extension seems to not have not been changed recently. And I've been using it over the last months without a problem. It started with the last RC release.
Latest version
Version 0.15.23
Released Jan 16, 2024 - 2.75 MB
Works with firefox 48.0 and later
Thanks for looking into this one 
. Also a daily driver for me
a month later
Same thing happens to me in the latest Orion RC, Readwise Highligher extension does not work.
15 days later
Had same issue with Firefox and Chrome versions. Just tried the Safari one as well and same behavior as Chrome (nothing happens after clicking the button. I never get a "Connect Readwise account" page and the page doesn't save. It's basically a no-op.
6 days later
.Vlad Yeah I figured, thought I'd just try my luck haha. Appreciate all the hard work you and your team have been putting in with all the amazing products
This is probably a stupid idea but there's no way to open-source just the extensions compatibility aspect of Orion right? So that it can be crowd sourced - what with so many extensions out there and platform changes on the extensions etc