Add to Chrome
Changelog

Every release, on the record.What's new in Sidenote - features, changes and fixes across the extension and web app.

Latest: v3.0.6 · 17 August 2026

Sidenote ships small and often. This page is generated straight from the repository's changelog - every version, no curated highlights.

v3.0.6

One fix, for the chat retry button.

Fixed
  • Pressing "Try again" after a chat answer fails no longer shows your question twice. The retry used to add a second copy of the question above the error bar every time; it now re-uses the one already there, and the answer lands beneath it. Asking something different after a failure still keeps the earlier question in the thread.

v3.0.5

One fix, finishing the job 3.0.4 started on Pro+ and Pro Max chat.

Fixed
  • Chat and Ask Library on the Pro+ and Pro Max plans now hold up on larger collections too. The 3.0.4 fix helped on smaller questions but a big collection could still end in "The model stopped before finishing that answer": the model was occasionally mangling the shape it answers in. The answer format is now locked down on the server so that cannot happen, and answers stream in word by word as before. Server-side, so no update is needed for this one.

v3.0.4

Two fixes: chat on the Pro+ and Pro Max plans, and a tidier sign-in.

Fixed
  • Chat and Ask Library work again on Pro+ and Pro Max (the Opus plans). Every question had been failing with "The model stopped before finishing that answer" or "I couldn't compose a response" - the model was mangling the format it answers in, on every turn. Fixed on the server, so no update is needed for this one; answers also stream in a little faster than before.
  • Signing in from the sidebar with Google (or another provider) no longer leaves you on a page that says you can close the tab and then moves to your dashboard anyway. The sign-in tab closes itself once the sidebar has your session and you are back on the page you were reading. Signing in on the website, or from a magic-link email, still lands on your dashboard, and the page now says so.

v3.0.3

One fix, for reading more than one attachment from the same email.

Fixed
  • Reading a second attachment from a Gmail or Outlook message no longer replaces the first one in your library. Every attachment on a message used to be filed under the message's address, so the next one read from the same email took over the earlier one's entry - its title changed in your library and collections, and the earlier document was gone. Each attachment now keeps its own entry. If an earlier attachment was lost this way, read it from the email again and it comes back as its own document; "Open original" still takes you to the email.

v3.0.2

One fix, for the citation chips' hover preview.

Fixed
  • Moving the mouse from one citation chip to the next now swaps the quote preview every time. It used to stay stuck on the first chip's quote - the neighbouring chip's preview never opened until the cursor wandered away and came back. Sweeping across a row of chips no longer flashes a preview for every chip passed, and the preview still stays open when you move into it to reach Save to notes.

v3.0.1

Polish from putting 3.0.0 through its paces on a real document before the store rollout: citations that match every page, a Find tab without lookalike rows, and a cited-passage card that knows when it is needed.

Fixed
  • Citations now highlight on PDFs whose extracted text carries invisible zero-width characters (common in Google Docs exports). Quotes containing them used to fail silently: the viewer scrolled but nothing lit up.
  • When a cited passage crosses a page boundary, the chip and the cited-passage card now name the page the quote actually sits on, and the jump scrolls there - both used to use the start page of the surrounding section. Applies to documents read after this release; re-reading an older document updates it.
  • Find no longer shows near-duplicate rows when a term appears twice within a few words ("I am AWS certified and specialise in the AWS ecosystem" was two almost-identical results). Occurrences that close now share one row, every hit in the row is marked in the panel, and clicking the row highlights all of them on the page. The match count now means distinct places in the document.
Changed
  • The cited-passage card only appears where it is the payoff for the click: documents opened from your library (no page to highlight) and collections (the passage may live in another document). On a page you have open, the citation click highlights the passage right on the page, so the card no longer covers the answer text repeating it.
  • When it does appear, the card starts compact with the quote centred and scrolled into view, fades its edges when there is more passage to see, and offers Show more / Show less instead of claiming a third of the panel.

v3.0.0

The citation engine, reworked end to end - which is why this one is a major version. Clicking a citation now pays off everywhere: on web-component sites that never worked before, in Chrome's built-in PDF viewer, from a document opened out of your library, and even when a page has changed since you saved it. Alongside that, a reliability pass on signed-in PDFs, chat streaming, and sign-in handling.

Added
  • A cited-passage card on every citation click. The panel now shows the exact passage a citation points at, with the quoted lines marked, a "Show on page" button, and one-click save to notes - so the click is useful even where the page itself cannot be highlighted.
  • Citations on web-component sites. The highlighter now sees through shadow DOM, so cited passages scroll and light up on sites built with web components (many modern apps and forums) where jumps previously failed.
  • Sign-in-protected PDFs. PDFs behind a login now load using your existing browser session, and when one still refuses, Sidenote says "open the PDF and sign in first" instead of a cryptic parse error. PDFs embedded in plain frames are detected too.
  • Your first document summarises itself. The first document you ever load runs a summary automatically, so the first thing you see is the product working.
  • Follow-up question chips under chat answers: remaining starter questions for the document, one tap each, no extra cost.
  • Read-aloud on chat answers and explanations.
  • Usage meters on Chat and Summarise, so you can see how much of your monthly allowance is left before you hit a cap.
  • Start a trial without leaving the panel - upgrade nudges now start the trial in place instead of detouring to the dashboard.
Fixed
  • Citation clicks from a document opened via the library or recents list now work: they reopen the source (or the video, timestamped) instead of dying with "no active tab".
  • A right-click question or explain no longer replays against the next document you open - a bug that could quietly spend chat turns and explain credits.
  • A slow summary can no longer paint itself onto the wrong document, and in-app navigation on YouTube, Notion, Slack and SharePoint no longer leaves the panel reading the previous page.
  • Interrupted chat streams keep everything already streamed instead of wiping the answer; a stream that goes silent for 60 seconds surfaces a clear "stalled" error.
  • Signing in no longer randomly signs you out elsewhere: token refresh is now coordinated across the extension's contexts.
  • Repeated citation clicks on the same page of a large PDF reuse the download instead of fetching the whole file again.
  • The onboarding checklist no longer disappears at the exact moment its steps become possible, and glossary jump highlights clean up properly when you switch rows or tabs.
Changed
  • Citation chips now look and behave like buttons: a clear tooltip, a pressed state while active, bigger click targets, and confirmation in the panel when the passage is highlighted on the page.
  • Security hardening on the extension's messaging: sign-in relays only accept messages from Sidenote's own pages.

v2.20.0

Attachments on an Outlook email can now be read without downloading them first. Open a message with a PDF, Word document or PowerPoint attached and summarise it where it sits, on Outlook.com or on a work or school account. Unlike Google Drive and Gmail, this one needs a permission. Outlook does not let anything outside Microsoft's own apps read an attachment from your browser session, so Sidenote reads it through Microsoft Graph instead, using the Microsoft connection you may already have for SharePoint and OneDrive. That means a one-time reconnect: existing Microsoft connections were granted before mail access existed and need approving again.

Added
  • Read PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoints attached to an Outlook email. Open the message and Sidenote lists everything on it that it can read, so an email carrying several files lets you pick. Attachments on replies count too, so a file sent halfway down a long thread is offered alongside the rest. Attachments keep their own names, and the saved document links back to the email it came from.
  • Read the email itself. Every Outlook message now also offers to summarise the message body, which is useful for a long thread whether or not anything is attached.
Changed
  • The Microsoft connection now also covers Outlook mail. Connecting Microsoft asks for read-only access to your mail alongside the existing SharePoint and OneDrive access. Sidenote reads a message only when you ask it to, and never lists, searches or scans your mailbox. On organisations that restrict application consent, an administrator may need to approve it.

v2.19.0

Attachments in Gmail can now be read where they sit. Open an email with a PDF, Word document or PowerPoint attached and summarise it without downloading it first. As with Google Drive, no new Google permissions are involved: Sidenote reads the file through the Gmail session you are already signed into.

Added
  • Read PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoints attached to an email. Open the email and Sidenote lists everything on it that it can read, so a message carrying several files lets you pick. Open one in Gmail's preview and it offers just that file instead. Attachments keep their own names and the saved document links back to the email it came from.
  • Read the email itself. Every Gmail message now also offers to summarise the message body, which is useful for a long thread whether or not anything is attached.

v2.18.0

Files stored in Google Drive can now be read without downloading them first. Open a PDF, Word document or PowerPoint in Drive and summarise it where it sits. No new Google permissions are involved: Sidenote reads the file through the Drive session you are already signed into.

Added
  • Read PDFs, Word documents and PowerPoints stored in Google Drive. Until now Sidenote could read a Google Doc but nothing else in your Drive, so a PDF meant downloading it and uploading it again by hand. Open the file in Drive and Sidenote picks it up, whether you open it in its own tab or preview it from the file list. Files shared with you work the same way as files you own. The document keeps its own name and links back to Drive, and Word documents and PowerPoints still get the typeset-page treatment that makes columns and tab stops render faithfully.
  • Bring in a Drive file without opening it. Paste a Drive link into the Google Drive card and Sidenote fetches it directly, for the case where someone sends you a file you have not opened yet.
Fixed
  • Drive files keep their real name. A file opened from Drive was recorded under the name of the Drive page rather than the document, so a saved PDF could appear in your library as "My Drive". Documents now carry the name Drive downloads them under.

v2.17.1

Citations now highlight the exact sentence in the Sidenote PDF viewer, Find lists every occurrence of your search term instead of one per section, and summaries cover the whole of the longest documents. Monthly usage allowances also reset on the right day for everyone.

Fixed
  • Citation highlights land on the cited words in PDFs. In the Sidenote PDF viewer, clicking a citation could start the highlight part-way through a word, several words after the passage actually began. The invisible text layer that sits over each page was measured incorrectly the first time a page was drawn, stretching parts of it far wider than the page itself. Highlights, text selection, and in-page search all read those measurements, so all three were affected. Sidenote now checks the layer once a page is drawn and re-measures it when it looks wrong.
  • Find lists every occurrence of your search term. Find reported one result per section of a document rather than one per occurrence, so a term appearing four times within the same section was listed once. Searching a two-page letter for "property" gave 2 results where there were 7. Every occurrence is now listed and jumps to its own place on the page, and a passage that falls where two sections overlap is no longer listed twice.
  • Summaries and glossaries cover the whole of very long documents. A document long enough to be split into more than about a thousand pieces was quietly cut short when it was read back, so its summary, glossary, or study set could be built from only the front of the document with nothing to say so. This affected the longest documents Pro+ and Pro Max allow.
  • Citations highlight correctly in Turkish and Azerbaijani documents. A capital I with a dot above ("İ", which begins words such as "İstanbul") shifted every highlight after it in the document by one character, or lost the highlight altogether.
  • Monthly usage allowances reset on the right day. For anyone whose reset day was the 29th, 30th, or 31st, the date crept forward every month (a 31 January reset became 3 March, then 3 April) and drifted out of step with the billing date it is meant to track.
  • Citations no longer settle for an approximate position in PDFs. While a PDF page was still being drawn, a citation could fall back to highlighting the start of the surrounding passage and then never move to the cited sentence once the page had finished.

v2.17.0

Sidenote is now on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons store. Citations are far more reliable on complex pages: Sidenote reads PDFs shown in an in-page viewer, opens collapsed sections to reach the cited passage, and reports honestly when a passage cannot be shown. Exported files also open cleanly on macOS.

Added
  • Sidenote is now on the Microsoft Edge Add-ons store. Install it from the Edge listing. Every install button across the site and dashboard now detects Edge and sends you to the Edge store instead of Chrome, and the in-extension "rate Sidenote" prompt links to whichever store you installed from.
Fixed
  • Citations now open the section holding the passage. On pages that tuck their content into expandable panels, such as accordions, FAQ rows, and "show more" sections, clicking a citation chip could do nothing at all: the passage had been found, but it was still hidden, so there was nothing to scroll to and no message to explain the silence. Sidenote now opens the section first, then scrolls to the passage and highlights it. Sections whose headers are links are opened without clicking them, so sites where those headers reload the page can no longer swallow the jump.
  • Highlights land on the cited passage in articles. Article citations recorded a position that could no longer be found once you returned to the page, so the highlight fell back to searching the whole document and could settle on a similar sentence elsewhere. Citations now anchor to a landmark that survives, and documents you saved before this release get the benefit without needing to be added again.
  • Citation jumps recover when the page has moved on. Some sites swap what a page shows without changing its address, for example a portal that replaces its overview with an inline document viewer. Clicking a citation there used to fail with "Could not highlight". Sidenote now reopens the saved page in a fresh tab and lands the highlight where the passage actually is.
  • Citations no longer report success when nothing showed. A citation was marked done the instant its passage was located, even if the passage then failed to appear because the page navigated away or the text stayed hidden. Sidenote now waits to confirm the passage is actually on screen, so a real miss is treated as one, retried or reported, instead of passing silently.
  • Saving a page that shows a PDF now saves the PDF. Some sites open documents in a viewer layered over the page rather than navigating to them, so saving captured the page around the document instead of the document itself, and citations pointed at text you were not reading. Sidenote now detects the embedded viewer, takes the exact PDF it is displaying, and saves it the same way as an uploaded PDF: correct reading order, page numbers, and citations that open the passage in Sidenote's own viewer. The panel labels the page "PDF" rather than "Article" while you are reading one, and the saved document takes the document's own name instead of the surrounding page's title. Opening a document, or switching to a different one in the same viewer, updates the panel to match without reopening it, and each one is saved as its own library entry rather than replacing the last.
  • Downloads open cleanly on macOS. Exported summaries, glossaries, packs, and chat threads were being flagged by macOS with an "Apple could not verify" warning that forced a trip through Privacy and Security settings. Exports are now delivered as ordinary web downloads, which macOS opens without complaint.

v2.16.0

Read YouTube videos with timestamp citations, turn collections into cited reports, and share collections with your team.

Added
  • YouTube videos, with citations that jump the player. Open a YouTube video and Sidenote reads its transcript: chat, Summarise, and glossary all work, and every citation carries a timestamp. Click a chip and the video seeks to that exact moment; from the library, citations open the video at the right second. Videos without captions and live streams are declined with a clear message.
  • Verified research reports (dashboard, Pro+ and above). Turn a collection into a structured report where every claim carries the same click-to-highlight citations as chat, verified against the source before it reaches you. A report costs 3 chat turns.
  • Collection matrix (dashboard, Pro+ and above). Ask up to 8 questions across every document in a collection and get a cited answer grid, one row per document, exportable as CSV. Each question costs 1 chat turn.
  • Study packs (dashboard, all paid plans including the trial). Flashcards and a self-marking quiz built from any document, with every card citing the passage it came from. A pack costs 1 glossary build.
  • Shared team collections. On a team plan, a collection's owner can share it with the team from the dashboard: teammates can read it and run chat, summaries, and reports over it using their own allowances, while membership and renaming stay with the owner. The account page's Team section also gains a per-member usage table for owners and admins.
Changed
  • Library search and Ask find more. Semantic search, Ask-my-library, and the Slack command were retuned against the current embedding model using real query data; queries that previously returned "no results" despite a genuine match now answer. Nonsense queries still return nothing.
Fixed
  • Citations containing hyphenated words highlight correctly. A quote that bookends a passage and includes a word like "follow-up" previously failed to match its source and fell back to highlighting the whole passage; the matcher now handles it.

v2.15.0

Free cited chat, one-click trials, and a paste-any-link reader: this release is about getting every reader to the citation moment faster.

Added
  • Chat with citations on the free plan. Every account now includes 10 chat turns a month on single documents, answered by a faster model with the same verified, click-to-highlight citations. Chat across collections remains part of Pro.
  • Read any link without opening it. A new "Read a link" card in the sidebar ingests any public article or PDF by URL, including when the page you are on is not supported. Scanned PDF links still go through OCR automatically.
  • A first-citation hint. Until your first citation click, the numbered chips pulse gently and a one-line hint under cited summaries explains what they do: click one and the exact source passage lights up. The same guidance now appears in the web dashboard.
  • A weekly operations digest (internal): signups, activation, usage, spend, and errors now land in the operator inbox every Monday instead of living in ad-hoc SQL.
Changed
  • Starting the trial takes one click. Phone verification is no longer required: start the 7-day Pro trial from the extension's Chat tab or the dashboard account page with just your signed-in email. One trial per email, as before.
  • Getting started on the web comes first. The dashboard checklist now leads with adding a document and asking a question; installing the extension is a recommended but optional step, so a web-only setup can finish the list.
  • Pricing and terms updated to describe free chat and the simpler trial, and the terms now state correctly that the trial starts only when you choose to start it.
Fixed
  • Chat no longer fails with "ran past the response budget" on answers it actually finished. When the model ends a reply mid-way through a long supporting quote, Sidenote now recovers the completed answer, dropping only the broken quote, instead of discarding the whole turn - and the budget message only appears when the response budget was genuinely exceeded.
  • Retrying a failed chat question no longer duplicates it. A question whose answer failed used to be stored again on every retry, showing up as repeated bubbles in the thread; retries now reuse the original message, and unanswered stragglers no longer leak into the context of later turns.
  • Long conversations no longer forget their most recent turns. Past ten exchanges, the context window sent to the model kept the START of the conversation and dropped the newest messages; it now keeps the most recent turns, so follow-up questions land in the right context.
  • Right-click actions no longer fail silently. If "Explain", "Ask", "Define", or "Save highlight" cannot carry your selection into the panel, the sidebar now says so with a clear message instead of opening empty.
  • Monthly limits reset fully on renewal. Paid accounts could previously begin a new billing cycle with stale summary, chat-token, and space-page counters and hit those caps early; every counter now resets together.
  • Failures in usage recording are now reported to error tracking instead of disappearing into server logs.

v2.14.0

A security and privacy hardening pass, plus in-app account deletion on mobile, team ownership transfer, and install buttons that follow your browser.

Added
  • Delete your account from the mobile app. Settings now has a Danger Zone with a confirmed deletion flow that cancels any subscription, removes your data, and signs you out, matching the web dashboard. A team owner is asked to hand off or cancel their team first.
  • Team owners can transfer ownership. A team owner can hand the team to another member, so they are no longer stuck when they want to leave or close their own account.
Changed
  • Install buttons follow your browser. Every "Add Sidenote" button, and the wording beside it, now sends Firefox visitors to the Firefox add-on and Chrome visitors to the Chrome Web Store, instead of always pointing at Chrome.
  • Comparison pages show when they were last reviewed, so their competitor and pricing details carry a visible date.
  • Clearer, more accurate copy. The pricing page now says the trial needs a quick phone verification; the homepage says a claim the source does not support loses its citation (rather than the claim itself being dropped); and the privacy policy states Discard-mode content is removed within 24 hours, consistently throughout.
Fixed
  • Team owners can close their account. Deleting the account of someone who owns a paid team no longer errors after their subscription was already cancelled, and an abandoned team checkout no longer traps the owner.
  • Navigating away cancels an in-progress ingest in the side panel, so a superseded document can no longer finish and pull focus to a new tab.
  • Summarising a Confluence page leaves it untouched. Its collapsed sections are no longer left expanded on the page afterwards.
  • If a PDF copy of an upload cannot be stored, you are told, instead of the upload silently reporting success while the typeset viewer is unavailable.
  • Signing in from a document link returns you to that document, and the connector connect window now reports when it is closed, blocked, or times out.
  • The mobile app no longer hangs on a request that never responds, and it recovers to a usable screen if fonts or the session fail to load at startup.
  • Scanned and exported files are removed from the mobile cache after use, instead of accumulating.
Security
  • Cross-account isolation tightened. A signed-in user can no longer call the internal quota functions to spend another user's monthly allowance; concurrent token refreshes in the extension are coalesced so a race can no longer sign you out; and cached data is now scoped per user in both the mobile app's offline library and the web dashboard, so a second account on a shared device never sees the first account's documents.
  • The extension bridges its sign-in only to the real Sidenote origin in production, never to a local page.
  • Analytics no longer runs on the signed-in dashboard, matching the privacy policy. The public URL reader now caps how much it downloads, and a production deploy fails fast if the anti-abuse controls are not configured.

v2.13.0

A first-run checklist for everyone, plainer side-panel wording, and the option to delete a collection's documents.

Added
  • Getting started, for everyone. The three-step first-run checklist (load a document, run a summary, click a citation) now shows for any signed-in account, not just trial users, so free users get the same activation nudge.
  • Delete a collection's documents, not just the grouping. The delete-collection confirm now offers an option to also delete the collection's documents from your library, not only the grouping. It is off by default, spares any document that is also filed in another collection (and any cached content another document or user still uses), and works the same way on the web dashboard, the extension side panel, and the mobile app.
Changed
  • Plainer wording in the side panel. A document's status now reads "Ready", "Saved", or "Source not open" instead of internal terms, and retention is labelled "Keep" or "Delete in 24h" instead of "Store" or "Discard".
  • The side panel remembers your last-used tool. Reopening a document lands on the tab you were last using rather than resetting every time.
  • A tighter, faster homepage. The landing page leads with the citation demo on mobile, tells one clearer story, and each pricing plan now says who it is best for.
Fixed
  • A tidier pre-sign-in demo. Every summary, chat, and glossary citation now quotes the exact line it points to (the summary chips read 1 through 8 in reading order, and the glossary highlights just the term), and reopening the side panel reuses the sample document tab instead of opening a duplicate.

v2.12.0

Pixel-perfect Google Docs, and a mobile app at full extension parity.

Added
  • The mobile app now matches the extension, feature for feature (mobile 1.0.0). Everything the side panel does works on iOS and Android: Explain and Find panes, the answer-language setting, collections with cross-document summaries/chat/glossary, ask-your-library with cited answers, share links and Markdown/CSV exports, and the trial-start flow.
  • Documents open inside the mobile app. Citations, find matches, and ask-your-library sources jump straight to the cited page of the full document viewer - the same renderer the web app uses, including the positioned text layer on scanned PDFs - without leaving the app.
  • Five ways to save from your phone. Paste a link, upload a file (PDF/DOCX/PPTX/TXT/MD/RTF, with scanned-PDF OCR), scan paper documents with the camera, capture any page - including ones behind logins - in the new in-app browser, or share a link or file to Sidenote from any app.
  • Connectors on mobile. Paste a Google Docs, Notion, Slack canvas, or SharePoint link to save it; connect and disconnect each service without leaving the app.
  • Dictate your questions. A microphone button on the chat and ask-your-library composers turns speech into text on-device.
  • Mobile sessions are now stored encrypted (key in the device keychain/keystore), and the app ships real Sidenote icons.
Changed
  • Google Docs now ingest pixel-perfect, with no extra clicks. Saving a Google Doc from the side panel captures Google's own typeset PDF through your signed-in session, so fonts, colours, columns and text boxes match the document exactly. Multi-tab documents keep each tab's title as a heading above its pages, text inside drawings stays searchable and citable, and the separate "grant access" step is gone. If the pixel-perfect capture cannot run, Sidenote falls back to the previous text rendering, so a save never fails.

v2.11.0

Try it before you sign in, answers in your language, and whole-space Confluence indexing.

Added
  • Try Sidenote without an account. A signed-out side panel now runs a guided demo on a bundled sample document: a cited summary, three scripted questions, a glossary build, and saving a note. Citations behave exactly as they do on a real document - click one and the document pane scrolls to the passage and highlights it - because the demo renders through the same citation pipeline. Your progress is remembered, so reopening the panel resumes where you left off.
  • Answer language. An "Answer language" picker in the account menu returns summaries, chat answers, explanations, glossaries and library-wide answers in any of 17 languages. Quoted source passages are never translated, so citations still match the document word for word. The setting applies per device.
  • Confluence space-wide indexing (Pro+ and above). An "Index this space" card on Confluence pages crawls an entire space through your own signed-in session and collects every page you can open. Space pages draw on their own monthly allowance (20 on trial, 200 on Pro+, 500 on Pro Max), so a crawl never eats into your document cap; free and Pro accounts see an upgrade prompt instead. Crawls pace themselves, can be stopped mid-run, and resume where they left off.
  • A review prompt, shown only once you have actually used Sidenote (three citation clicks or two summaries). It never interrupts an answer that is still streaming, waits after a dismissal, and stops asking for good once you review or dismiss it twice. It links to the right store for your browser.
  • Ask your library, in the side panel. The Library drawer gains a question box that answers across every document you have saved, not just the one you are reading. Each citation names the document it came from and opens it. Needs Pro or an active trial, and draws on the same monthly chat allowance as chat.
  • Team plan. £18 per seat per month (£14.40 per seat billed annually). Every member gets Pro-level caps, plus shared team collections, centralized per-seat billing, and SAML SSO with domain auto-join. The side panel shows a Team badge and drops the personal upgrade prompts, since seats are managed by the team owner. See the Enterprise tab on the pricing page.
Changed
  • The 7-day Pro trial is more generous: 10 documents (was 3) and 5 glossary builds (was 3). Three documents was too thin to evaluate collections or a library-wide ask inside a week. Explanations, summaries and chat turns are unchanged.
  • The locked Collections button now leads somewhere. On the free plan, clicking it explained that collections are paid but gave you no way to act on that. The message now carries an Upgrade link, and stays on screen until you dismiss it rather than vanishing after a few seconds.
  • Google Docs with multiple tabs now ingest every tab rather than only the first, including each tab's lists, styles, headers and drawings, and every tab title becomes a citable heading. Single-tab documents render exactly as before.
  • Share links are only created when you ask for one. Opening the Share popover used to mint a link immediately; now you press "Create link". Every share popover also links through to the full "Shared links" manager.
  • Upload limits tell the truth. The upload zone shows your tier's real size ceiling (5 MB up to 75 MB) instead of a hardcoded 25 MB, plus how many documents you have left this month.
  • Caps warn you before you spend. Chat and ingest show a cap banner up front instead of failing afterwards, and the wording matches your actual tier: no "upgrade" prompt when you are already on the top plan.
  • Locked buttons explain themselves. Clicking a locked action opens an inline explanation rather than doing nothing (a disabled button can never show its tooltip).
  • The sign-in screen no longer implies a trial starts automatically. The 7-day Pro trial is opt-in.
  • Notes can be saved from the keyboard and on touch (right-click or Shift+Enter), filter and option groups are arrow-key navigable, retention indicators can be focused, and there is now a System theme option.
  • Trial usage is visible in the panel header.
Fixed
  • A Find-tab jump that cannot locate its passage now says so, instead of silently doing nothing.
  • Retry on the document viewer actually refetches the document.
  • A chat turn that fails can be retried in one click.
  • Chat history stays readable after a trial ends.
  • OCR and Office document ingests can be stopped while they run.
  • The Firefox host-access card reflects the permissions you actually granted, and the ingest panel's "couldn't detect a document" card now agrees with it.
  • Sending a message clears the composer, switching viewer tabs confirms with a toast, and the locked Collections header explains why it is locked.

v2.10.0

Share links for glossaries and chat.

Added
  • Share links now cover glossaries and chat - whole conversation threads and single answers (question + answer) - alongside summaries, for both individual documents and collections. A Share action sits in every relevant sidebar/dashboard pane, plus a "Shared links" manager to copy or revoke links.
Changed
  • Sharing again refreshes the existing link in place - same URL, latest content - instead of leaving the old version live. The public share page now renders a frozen snapshot taken at share time.

v2.9.0

Library organisation across the extension and dashboard - starred documents, tags, and notes search - plus share links, rename, lifecycle emails, and hardening.

Added
  • Starred + tags - star documents and tag them from the extension library drawer and the dashboard library alike: star toggles on rows, a "Starred" sort, tag chips on rows, match-all tag filters with counts, and a per-row tag editor with suggestions drawn from your existing tags.
  • Notes search - filter saved notes in the sidebar Notes tab and the dashboard workspace notes pane, with a match count and highlighted matches across both the quote and the comment.
  • Share-link manager on the dashboard document page - see the active share links per summary length, copy them, create new ones, and revoke with confirmation.
  • Inline rename on the dashboard document header - Enter saves, Escape cancels - with the new title reflected in the library immediately.
  • Chat follow-up queue - the composer stays enabled while an answer streams; Enter parks one follow-up as a visible "Queued" bubble (cancellable) that sends automatically when the answer settles, and it never flushes into a different thread.
  • Open-panel keyboard shortcut - Ctrl+Shift+S (Cmd+Shift+S on Mac) opens Sidenote on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox (rebind it in your browser's extension shortcut settings if another feature already claims the combination).
  • Sidebar toasts - accessible notifications confirm exports and bulk library actions, and explain citation-jump failures ("Could not highlight - the page content may have changed.") instead of failing silently.
  • Read-time estimates ("~N min read") on extension library cards, and a select-all row over the filtered list while bulk-selecting.
  • Lifecycle emails - welcome, activation, trial-nudge, and 30-day dormant emails (at most one per user per day), honouring a new email opt-out and a signed one-click unsubscribe link.
  • Env-gated Sentry error monitoring - errors only, with a fail-closed scrubber that strips request bodies, cookies, auth headers, and email-like strings from every event; with no DSN configured the SDK is never loaded or bundled.
  • The dismissed onboarding checklist can be restored from the account page.
Changed
  • The loaded-document bar's controls are consolidated into a single keyboard-navigable Document settings menu - Rename (new), the retention toggle, per-site pause, Open in dashboard, and Delete.
  • Admin accounts now skip rate-limit accounting entirely on feature routes; phone verification stays rate-limited for every tier.
Fixed
  • Transient Twilio failures (timeouts, rate limiting, 5xx) while sending a phone-verification code are retried with backoff instead of immediately failing the attempt.
  • Slack polish from final review: empty /sidenote ask answers no longer produce a blank Slack notification, and a tampered account-link URL shows the invalid-link panel instead of "[object Object]".

v2.8.0

Sidenote inside Slack.

Added
  • `/sidenote` slash command - /sidenote ask answers a question from your whole Sidenote library with cited sources, right in Slack; search, help, and unlink subcommands round it out.
  • Save to Sidenote message shortcut - save any Slack message (with its permalink) into your library as the new slack_message source type.
  • Slack account linking page on the dashboard and a workspace install flow, with signed link tokens and verification of every incoming Slack request signature.

v2.7.0

Google Docs ingestion update.

Changed
  • Google Docs now connects with the narrower drive.file OAuth scope instead of drive.readonly. The first time a document needs its typeset PDF, Google's Picker confirms access to just that one file - Sidenote no longer requests read access to your whole Drive. Existing connections are nudged to reconnect.
Added
  • Text inside Google Docs text boxes and drawings is now recovered from the document - searchable in summaries, chat, and the glossary, and selectable in place so citations highlight the right spot.

v2.6.1

Bug-fix + progress-calibration release.

Fixed
  • Deleting a loaded document no longer closes the user's active browser tab - only stray Sidenote viewer tabs for that document are cleaned up.
Changed
  • Split single-document summarise progress calibration into two phases - a shared Haiku fan-out term (summarise:chunks) plus a per-length combine term (summarise:{length}:combine) - so cold-build estimates stay accurate at scale and warm/cold estimates share data.
  • Refit the progress cold-start priors from production telemetry and added a size-outlier guard so a pathologically large document can't skew the fit.

v2.6.0

Server-authoritative progress estimates, regen-safe summary caps, and a premium loading UI - alongside a large growth/SEO and free-tools batch.

Added
  • Progress bars - calibrated, self-learning time estimates on Summarise, Explain, Glossary, and collection builds. Estimates are learned as a fitted line per feature and served from the server as the single source of truth, with a smooth bar that holds at 99% until the result lands.
  • Per-tier summary caps - monthly summary limits surfaced on the pricing cards and the dashboard usage panel; collection summaries now count toward the cap, and cacheOnly reads are exempt.
  • Opt-in trial - the 7-day trial no longer auto-starts; the phone gate fires only at activation, and the universal phone gate was removed from feature routes.
  • First-run onboarding checklist on the dashboard library.
  • Export beyond Markdown - HTML, plain-text, PDF, and rich-copy export for summaries, chat, and glossary.
  • Find-in-document tab in the sidebar.
  • Free tools - PDF-to-text, document-diff, and reading-level rewriter, each with an embeddable snippet.
  • Content & social proof - blog tag archives + cross-linking, an expanded glossary, HowTo JSON-LD, comparison guides, and the Chrome Web Store rating on the marketing site.

v2.5.0

Fixed
  • 8-digit code sign-in now also signs the user into the web dashboard.

v2.4.0

Firefox host-permission support.

Added
  • One-click Firefox host-access grant from the sidebar (HostAccessBanner + useHostAccess), re-injecting open tabs after the grant is given.

v2.3.0

Cross-browser sidebar support.

Added
  • Firefox + Opera sidebar_action backends and a panel open-state probe; Opera added to the platform-capabilities table.

v2.2.0

Added
  • Citation reveal for collapsed accordions - an act/verify/escalate loop that force-shows a hidden cited passage and restores the page state afterwards.
  • Cross-browser adapter groundwork (PanelController, browser adapter, capabilities table, Edge packaging target).
  • Upgraded the active embeddings model to voyage-4-large.

v2.1.0

Chrome Web Store release and the in-app AI workspace.

Added
  • AI workspace on the document and collection views (drawer, five panes, selection pill) and on the standalone /documents/:id route, with web-native viewer highlighting.
  • Free word-counter, readability-checker, and AI-summarizer tools.
  • "Open source" re-engages the live page alongside the Sidenote panel.
  • Library batch: find, share, command palette, export, bulk select; per-site pause.
  • Redesigned app icon (serif "s" with a highlighter swipe) and "Lamplight & Ink" auth email templates.

v2.0.0

Email-code auth and the Sidenote mobile app.

Added
  • 6-digit email-code (OTP) sign-in fallback on every surface, plus mobile OAuth.
  • Sidenote mobile app (Expo, iOS + Android) - Summary + Chat panes with citations, TTS, and threads; a save flow with WebView extraction and share-sheet intake; settings, auth, library, glossary, and notes.
  • Chrome Web Store asset kit rebuilt against the real 1.16.0 panel UI.

v1.16.0

Pre-Chrome-Web-Store release: feedback batches, pixel-faithful rendering, account deletion, and an SEO growth build.

Added
  • Rendering - pixel-faithful DOCX rendering via Adobe PDF conversion; native PDF exports for Google Docs & SharePoint; PowerPoint (.pptx) ingest; RTF and MDX uploads; native SharePoint + OneDrive ingest via Microsoft Graph.
  • Features - Notes (saved highlights with jump-back), library-wide semantic search (Title/Meaning), selection→chat and a right-click menu, citation chips on summaries, a content-drift banner, summary TTS, and an export pack.
  • Account & audit - self-serve account deletion, comprehensive activity logging, an extension error beacon, and DB security hardening (SSRF guard, citation Turnstile, webhook idempotency, durable cross-instance IP rate limiting).
  • Marketing / SEO - the "Citation Engine" site redesign, blog + glossary + free tools, per-page Open Graph images, schema/E-E-A-T, and IndexNow.

v1.11.0

Notion + Slack Canvas connectors; legal & security pages.

Added
  • Notion and Slack Canvas connectors end-to-end (OAuth, token crypto, extractors, Connections card, viewer gate, migrations).
  • A /security disclosure policy + security.txt, a support page, and custom 404 / error pages.

v1.10.0

Multi-document collections; library retention & search.

Added
  • Multi-document collections - backend plus extension UI with cross-document citations, and collection-glossary parity with single documents.
  • Dashboard subroutes (library, collections, upload, usage, per-document), an inline retention toggle, and server-side library search.
  • /pricing, /features/collections, /for/confluence, and a Sidenote-vs-NotebookLM comparison page.
Fixed
  • Chat markdown rendering (citations, code fences, bold, overflow) and citation scroll-into-view on long, window-scrolled pages.

v1.9.0

Added
  • Prompt-cache token accounting in the usage table and cost estimates.
Fixed
  • Preserve heading size / paragraph alignment / subtitle colour on render; refresh source_type when reusing a library entry.

v1.8.0

DOCX / Google-Docs fidelity and OAuth sign-in.

Added
  • First-class Google Docs ingest via the Docs API.
  • OAuth sign-in (Google + Apple + GitHub) alongside magic link.
  • Preserve DOCX / Google-Docs formatting - embedded images, page headers, custom tab stops, font sizes, and text colours.
Fixed
  • Numerous DOCX rendering issues (tab columns, bullet tables, text boxes, colours) and cross-context session validation after OAuth.

v1.6.0

Added
  • Scanned-PDF OCR gated behind the paid tier and surfaced on the pricing page.

v1.5.0

Added
  • Scanned-PDF OCR via Adobe PDF Services, with an input-hash cache.

v1.4.0

In-browser document viewer and PDF rendering.

Added
  • In-browser viewer at /documents/:id - bundled pdf.js with a text-layer overlay and citation highlights, a sticky toolbar (jump-to-page + zoom), and DPR-aware rendering; embeds stored PDFs.
  • Capture rendered HTML at ingest for DOCX/TXT/MD; multi-span citation highlights; Store/Discard retention with an hourly cleanup cron; a phone-OTP trial gate with per-tier burst rate limits; the v2 marketing redesign.
Fixed
  • Extensive PDF citation-locator fixes - ligatures, line-break hyphenation, tab-stop columns, and quotes spanning inline element boundaries.

v1.1.0

Initial tagged release - Sidenote's core reading assistant.

Added
  • Pipeline - document ingestion, hierarchical summarise, chat with per-claim / per-quote citations, glossary (jargon / acronyms / proper nouns), and "explain simply".
  • Citations - structured per-claim quotes that highlight the exact supporting sentence, with persistent highlights and reveal-before-jump.
  • Accounts & billing - tier foundations with per-feature caps, magic-link auth, Stripe billing + dashboard, Pro / Pro+ / Pro Max and admin tiers, and anniversary-aligned cap resets.
  • Library - a document history drawer, headless viewer mode, cache-aware ingest, and auto-display of cached summaries/glossaries.
  • Marketing - landing / privacy / terms pages, branded transactional emails, and the design system + extension shell.
Ready when you are

Stop digging. Start asking.

Add Sidenote to your browser, open any page in your wiki, and ask it the question you’ve been Slacking the team about.

Add to Chrome (free)See the citation demo

7-day Pro trial · No card required · Free plan forever