Prasanna Kumar

QuickOWL

A browser add-on that passes selected text to your favourite sites through a custom right-click menu. Available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge and Thunderbird.

The problem

A lot of everyday work is copying text from one page and pasting it into another — to search for it, or to open some page that takes it as input. Repeat that a few dozen times a day and a surprising amount of time goes into the copying, the tab switching and the pasting.

How it works

QuickOWL adds your own sites to the right-click menu. The selected text is passed along as input and the page opens in a new tab.

  1. Select text
  2. Right click
  3. Choose QuickOWL
  4. Pick your site

Install

  • Google Chrome

    Open the link in Chrome, Brave or Opera. Opera may warn that it is from another source, but the Chrome extension works there just fine.

    In-browser: Window → Extensions → Find more add-ons

  • Mozilla Firefox

    Open the link in Firefox.

    In-browser: Tools → Add-ons and themes → Find more add-ons

  • Apple Safari

    The App Store link can be opened from any browser on macOS.

    In-browser: Safari → Settings (⌘,) → Extensions

  • Microsoft Edge

    Open the link in Edge.

    In-browser: Window → Extensions → Find more add-ons

  • Thunderbird

    Reach the add-on from inside Thunderbird to get the + Add to Thunderbird button.

    In-app: Tools → Add-ons and themes → Find more add-ons → type “quickowl” and press Enter

Demos

Chrome extension
Safari extension

Screenshots

QuickOWL context menu showing user-defined target sites QuickOWL options page listing saved URLs Adding a new URL to QuickOWL Importing URLs into QuickOWL from a CSV file QuickOWL passing selected text to a target site in a new tab

The sample data used above is available as a sample_urls.csv download — pick it in the Import URLs option to try it yourself.

Work in progress

  • Outlook

    • Email client
    • In progress

    Workaround: open outlook.office.com in a supported browser — the browser add-on works on Outlook mail there.

  • Slack

    • Chat client
    • Not started

    Workaround: open slack.com in a supported browser — the browser add-on works on Slack messages there.

Privacy

  1. No personal information is collected, saved or transferred by this extension.
  2. Your URLs are stored locally in the browser's own extension storage. That storage is local to the browser and reachable only through the browser's extension APIs, so there is no easy way to get at it directly. The data is never transmitted anywhere.
  3. The permissions screen says “Read your browsing history” after installing, but the add-on does not read your history. It only sends the selected text to the URLs you defined — no extra reading, no background activity.

Thanks

Special thanks to wOxxOm on Stack Overflow, who helped resolve some of the blocking issues while building this for Chrome and Firefox.

Support

Found a bug, or want a feature? Send it through the form below.