Websites

Websites is a read-it-later service built into sideBar. Save pages you want to read, and they’re stored on-device for offline reading once that device has cached them, and available to sideBar so you can work with the content together: summarise it, ask questions about it, take notes, or dig deeper with further research.

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Saving a Page

There are three ways to save a web page:

• Share sheet: tap the share button in any app and choose sideBar to save the current page instantly. sideBar queues the page right away, then finishes processing in the app. When the sideBar app is already open, the pending website appears there immediately while the save continues. See Widgets & Extensions to enable it.
• Safari extension: tap the sideBar button in your browser toolbar to save the page without leaving it. When the sideBar app is already open, the website appears there right away and then updates as saving finishes. See Widgets & Extensions to set it up.
• Manual URL entry: tap + in the Websites tab and paste or type the URL directly.

Once saved, sideBar fetches the page and automatically extracts the title, domain, favicon, full page content, and estimated reading time. If a publication date is detectable, that’s saved and displayed too. You can rename the title any time after saving. As soon as processing finishes, the saved page is added to your Websites list and is ready to open without waiting for a manual refresh. If you save a page while offline, sideBar still adds it to your list right away and queues the save for later. The page content finishes downloading and processing when you are back online.

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Supported Sites

sideBar has custom parsers for a range of popular sites, giving you cleaner content and richer extraction than a generic fetch. For some sites this means getting meaningfully more — YouTube transcripts, full Substack articles, or Twitter/X tweets with author and date. For others it means noise and chrome stripped out for a better reading experience across publications like The Verge, Wired, and HBR. For all other websites, sideBar uses a general-purpose parser that works well across most publications and blogs. Note that paywalled publications (such as the New York Times, Financial Times, and Bloomberg) will only yield as much content as the site makes available to non-subscribers. sideBar will flag when a saved page appears to be paywalled.

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YouTube Support

Saving a YouTube URL triggers automatic transcript extraction. The status progresses through three stages, queued, processing, then ready. Once ready, the transcript is stored alongside the video’s title and metadata and is available to sideBar for summarising, quoting, or answering questions about the video. If extraction fails, the page is still saved and you’ll see an error status in the transcript field.

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Managing Your Web Pages

• Pin important pages to keep them at the top of your list.
• Archive pages you’re finished with. Archived pages aren’t deleted, you can always find them again.
• Rename any page by tapping its title.
• Delete a page to remove it permanently.
• Search across your saved pages by title, domain, or page content. A useful way to find something when you can’t remember where you saved it.

You can also swipe right on any page to archive or unarchive it, or swipe left to delete it.

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Reading a Saved Page

Open any saved page to see its full content. Tap the page title to open the original URL in your default browser. Text is selectable if you want to copy a passage. On iPad, closing a page also exits the expanded reading view and returns you to the normal split layout. Saved pages stay available offline on the devices that have already cached them. Archived pages follow the same rule. If a page has never been cached on the current device, sideBar tells you it is not available offline yet.

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Working with sideBar on a Page

With a page open, sideBar can see the full content and work with you on it. Ask it to summarise the article, explain a concept, pull out key points, draft notes, or find related information. See Chat for more on how sideBar uses what you have open.

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Export and Sharing

From any saved page you can:

• Export as markdown: saves a .md file you can open in any text editor.
• Copy the title, URL, or full markdown content with a single tap, handy for pasting into a note, message, or document.

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Keyboard Shortcuts