Alternative to Pocket
A Pocket alternative for the part you can keep: highlights.
Mozilla shut Pocket down on 8 July 2025 and kept exports open until October 2025. It was a read-later service: save an article, read it in a clean view, highlight it, tag it, sync it. Selection Toolbar is not a read-later app. It is the highlighter half of that habit, working on the live page instead of a saved copy, with your highlights and notes stored in your browser and exportable as Markdown at any time.
If you came here for
The things people say they miss when they look for a replacement.
- Highlights that survive: mark a passage today, find it marked when you open the page next month.
- A note on a highlight, not a separate document you have to find again.
- One place that lists what you highlighted, on this page and everywhere.
- A way out: Markdown you can paste into Obsidian, Notion, or a plain text file, with the source link on every entry.
- Nothing to sign up for, and nothing that can be shut down with your data inside it.
Side by side
| What | Selection Toolbar | |
|---|---|---|
| Status | Closed 8 July 2025; exports ended October 2025. | Live on Chrome, Edge and Firefox, developed by one person who publishes every change in the release notes. |
| Highlighting | Inside the saved copy of an article, in the Pocket reader. | On the page itself, in four colours, with one key. The highlight is restored on the next visit and follows the text if the page shifts. |
| Notes | Tags on the saved item. | A free-text note on each highlight, edited in the side panel. |
| Where your data lives | Pocket's servers, synced to the apps. | Your browser's extension storage, on your machine. Premium syncs it across your browsers if you want that. |
| Export | CSV of saved URLs at shutdown; highlights were not in the export. | Copy or download as Markdown any time: a heading per page with the link, a quote per highlight, your note under it. |
| Price | Free, with a Premium tier that ended with the service. | Free. Everything on this page has no account and no fee. |
Facts about Pocket are as published by its maker at the time of writing; tell us if one is out of date.
Not here
So you do not install it for the wrong reason.
- No saved copy of the article and no offline reading. Selection Toolbar works on the page you are on; if the page goes away, the highlight stays in your list as text, marked as not found.
- No reader view, no tags, no recommendations.
- Sync is a paid extra, Premium; on the free tier highlights stay on the machine where you made them.
- Saving whole pages into named collections is a different extension by the same developer, Collections, and the two work together.
How it works
Three keys cover most of it.
- 1Select text on any page. The bar appears beside it. Press H to highlight; the picker under the bar changes the colour or removes it.
- 2Press Alt Shift H for the panel: this page, all pages, search, and a note on each highlight.
- 3Export copies or downloads everything as Markdown: a heading per page linking to the source, a quote per highlight, your note under it.
Questions
Can I import my Pocket export?
Not the highlights, because Pocket did not export them. The CSV of saved URLs is a list of pages, which fits Collections, the companion extension for saving pages, better than a highlighter.
What happens to a highlight when the page changes?
The extension stores the exact text with a little context around it and looks for it again on every visit, so an edit elsewhere on the page does not lose it. If the passage itself was removed, the highlight is kept in the panel and marked as not found on this page, never deleted for you.
Is it free?
Yes. Highlights, notes, the panel and Markdown export are free with no account. Sync across devices is the first paid extra, Premium; nothing that is free today moves behind it.
Where do my highlights live?
In your browser's own extension storage, on your machine. Nothing is uploaded unless you later choose to sign in and turn on sync.
Try it on this page.
Install, come back, select a sentence, press H. It is highlighted the next time you open this page.