Mobile Webviewer

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Mobile Webviewer is a lightweight, mobile-first web viewer for Obsidian.

It now has two clearly named modes:

• Browser View: the original plugin pane, designed like a normal mobile browser with a top address/search input, page area, bottom controls, history, downloads, bookmarks, reading list, cache controls, console copy, import/export, and one-tap link capture. It includes a persistent mobile tab strip with per-tab URL and back/forward state. The foreground is now an editable, reader-style Obsidian web note by default. A full Chromium webview page stays loaded behind it for real browser navigation and can be switched in with Note/Web/Split controls. Edited text and doodles auto-save into plugin data. Use 存 MD when you want to add a Markdown file to the vault. On mobile it uses a full-height browser layout with the Obsidian pane header hidden and the bottom toolbar floating over the page instead of shrinking the webview.
• Real-page navigation now catches target=_blank and window.open in the Chromium webview and routes them to browser tabs, so page jumps behave more like Chrome/Edge instead of falling back to the home shell.
• Note Browser: a real Markdown note named Mobile Webviewer.md with HTML elements rendered inside the note. The plugin enhances that note with a Bing-like lightweight search shell, editable web-note foreground, live web backend, bookmarks bar, cache, downloads, history, and More menu. NoteDraw buttons are deduped so Mobile Webviewer surfaces keep one visible magic-wand launcher while still using NoteDraw's real page controller behind it.

How NoteWeb reads a page

NoteWeb is meant to be the best Markdown view of a web page you can get inside Obsidian, so it does not try to reimplement article extraction. It runs two production-grade libraries, both of them the same ones a browser reader mode would use:

• Readability (Mozilla, Apache-2.0) — the algorithm Firefox's reader mode ships. It scores the DOM and picks the actual article.
• Turndown (MIT) — turns that article into Markdown with GFM tables, strikethrough, task lists, fenced code with language tags, image alt text and figure captions.

There are two extraction passes, and which one runs depends on what the site allows:

1. Fetched HTML. The page is fetched, Readability scores it, Turndown converts it. This is fast and covers ordinary article sites.
2. Rendered DOM. Many sites refuse step 1 outright: baike.baidu.com answers a programmatic request with HTTP 403 "百度安全验证", and sites such as 36kr.com, mp.weixin.qq.com and bilibili.com ship an empty app shell that only fills in once scripts run. For those, the same Readability build is injected into the live Chromium guest and reads the document the user is actually looking at — which is exactly what Edge's reading view does. The result comes back as HTML and is converted to Markdown on the host.

NoteWeb switches to pass 2 automatically whenever pass 1 hits a bot wall or returns too little text to be worth rendering, and it waits for the guest to finish loading before reading it. Reader mode therefore works on the first open of a page, not only after a manual refresh.

read: — open a page straight in the reader

Type or paste read: in front of an address, exactly like Edge:

read:baike.baidu.com/item/玉泽演/102526
read:https://example.com/a/long/article?x=1
read:量子计算

The page opens as a Markdown note in NoteWeb and never bounces into the raw Web surface. read:, read： (full-width colon) and READ : all work, and what follows can be a bare host, a full URL or a search phrase. The prefix is an instruction to the plugin — it is stripped before the address reaches the webview, the tab records, the history or the settings.

Platform note: pass 2 needs an Electron Chromium guest, which desktop Obsidian provides. On mobile Obsidian the guest is a cross-origin iframe whose DOM cannot be read, so only pass 1 is available there.

Install

Copy these files into your vault:

.obsidian/plugins/mobile-webviewer/
  manifest.json
  main.js
  styles.css

Then reload Obsidian and enable Mobile Webviewer in Community plugins.

What it can do

• Open the original browser-like view inside Obsidian.
• Open the note-based browser shell as a real Markdown file.
• Use an editable reader-style note as the foreground while keeping a full browser page loaded in the background.
• Switch between Note, Web, and Split modes.
• Auto-save edited text and doodles into plugin data, then export to Markdown under Mobile Webviewer Notes with 存 MD. The export is the note as it reads: an untouched page writes its converted Markdown byte for byte, and an edited note is re-converted from the edited text - headings, GFM tables, task lists, fenced code with language tags, links and image alt text all survive instead of collapsing into one flat paragraph.
• Pan a note with two fingers while the NoteDraw wand is on. The drawing canvas owns every touch in select mode, which used to leave a long page unscrollable; two fingers now scroll it (with momentum) and drawing modes still get the gesture for ink.
• Keep Note Browser and Browser View on the same URL-backed web-note data, so edited text and doodles follow the page when switching modes.
• Load multi-page Bing results with a More results control instead of stopping after the first compact result set.
• Load URLs or search text from one input.
• Use multiple persistent browser tabs.
• Open popup/new-window links as real browser tabs and keep titles, URLs, load state, and hover/context-link status synchronized with the browser shell.
• Find text inside the live page where accessible and inside the reader/search layer.
• Zoom pages and switch between mobile and desktop-width surfaces.
• Choose mobile or desktop page width.
• Switch mobile/desktop request UA for internal fetch, search, save, and download requests.
• Toggle night mode, eye-protection mode, incognito mode, fullscreen, rotation, JavaScript sandbox blocking, ad blocking, and ad marking from More.
• Keep local history.
• Save the current page as HTML.
• Save the current page as MHT/MHTML with a compact set of fetched page resources when available.
• Download the current URL as a file into the configured vault folder.
• Use parallel byte-range downloads when the server supports resumable ranges; otherwise the plugin automatically uses a single connection.
• Add/remove bookmarks.
• Save pages to the reading list.
• Reuse cached reader pages.
• Extract articles with Mozilla Readability — the algorithm Firefox's reader mode ships — instead of picking the biggest container, so a page with a fat sidebar reads as the article and not as the sidebar.
• Read pages whose text only exists after scripts run by extracting from the rendered Chromium DOM when the fetched HTML is a bot wall or an app shell (baike.baidu.com, 36kr, mp.weixin.qq.com, bilibili.com).
• Convert to Markdown with Turndown and GFM, keeping headings, nested and ordered lists, task lists, tables, fenced code with language tags, image alt text, figure captions and absolute links.
• Open any address straight in the reader with the read: prefix: read:baike.baidu.com/item/玉泽演/102526.
• View or copy console/navigation logs from More.
• Inspect the active browser surface from More, including whether the current page is using real Electron Chromium webview or iframe fallback, current URL, loading state, back/forward availability, zoom, UA mode, and download folder.
• Catch common downloadable links inside the live webview and route them to the plugin Downloads panel.
• Open downloaded files from the Downloads panel or reveal their location when the desktop shell exposes that capability.
• Run global reader-layer custom CSS and JavaScript.
• Manage URL-matched user script rules with wildcard matching, per-rule enable switches, CSS, and JavaScript.
• Sniff media resources, list page resources, view source, translate pages to many target languages or follow Obsidian's current UI language, read page text aloud, generate a QR-code panel, copy share text, report URL text, and create a .url shortcut file.
• Export and import a portable Mobile Webviewer JSON package for bookmarks, reading list, history, downloads, user scripts, web notes, and common settings. Clipboard import also accepts common bookmark HTML and plain URL lists.
• Autofill accessible form fields from a local profile.
• Use a richer settings console with grouped browser, display, download, script, autofill, data, and support-code controls.
• Use a mobile bottom toolbar.
• Open the current page in the system browser from More.
• Insert the current page as a Markdown link into the active note.
• Show a NoteDraw-style magic-wand button and trigger NoteDraw where available.
• Open links through Obsidian's link menu where supported.
• Open obsidian://mobile-webviewer?url=https%3A%2F%2Fexample.com.

Cancip integration API

Mobile Webviewer exposes a versioned API at app.plugins.plugins["mobile-webviewer"].api. Cancip uses this API before falling back to generic plugin commands or a second network fetch.

The API can read the active Browser View or Note Browser embed, including the current URL, title, selected text, edited reader text, extracted images and links. It also opens URLs, lists/creates/switches/closes web tabs, toggles bookmarks, adds reading-list entries, sends structured context to Cancip, and publishes navigation/tab/list events through subscribe.

const api = app.plugins.plugins["mobile-webviewer"].api;
const status = api.getStatus();
const page = await api.getCurrentContext({ includeContent: true });
await api.open({ url: "https://obsidian.md", newTab: true });
await api.sendToCancip({ prompt: "总结这页", submit: false });

sendToCancip attaches context and prepares an optional prompt. It does not submit a model request unless submit: true is explicitly supplied. The API version is independent from the plugin version so clients can negotiate future changes without parsing release numbers.

Commands

• Mobile Webviewer: Open Note Browser
• Mobile Webviewer: Open Note Browser Home
• Mobile Webviewer: Open URL in Note Browser

Browser model

The plugin uses a dual-layer model. The foreground is an editable Obsidian-like web note extracted from the page, suitable for reading, editing, highlighting, and doodling. The background keeps the complete browser page alive with Electron Chromium webview when Obsidian exposes it, falling back to iframe where needed. Note/Web/Split controls switch between the editable note, the real page, and both together. More contains power actions such as system-browser open, copy link, bookmark, reading list, history, downloads, matched user scripts, browser-status inspection, console, QR code, and cache management. Downloads are saved under Mobile Webviewer Downloads by default and can be configured in settings. The home shell expands to the available mobile screen and avoids browser suggestion overlays that can cover the keyboard.