Obsidian has released a Webclipper for a variety of browsers. Making it easy to get stuff into your notes from your browser is a key thing to make as frictionless as possible. So this is a laudable step.

I’ve been using the Markdownload webclipper for 4 years.

Both allow you to precisely template what gets saved and in which way when you save a page or a selection on a page. That way I can ensure it ends up in my Obsidian notes tool in a shape that is immediately useful inside that environment.

A key difference is that Markdownload saves to the file system, it simply puts a text file with an .md file extension in a folder I designated, and that is the same folder Obsidian looks for my notes. It can also save through Obsidian though. It’s independent and useful regardless of Obsidian, because of it.

The Obsidian webclipper saves through Obsidian, I suspect so you can leverage whatever you have set up in Obsidian for incoming material. It brings Obsidian to the front and does the saving, and if you want opens the note to continue there. In my case it meant the default template for new notes got applied by the templater plugin, overwriting the material I tried to save. The settings of the Obsidian webclipper does not have the option to save to a folder, bypassing Obsidian.
This to me introduces an unneeded dependency (and the need to figure out suppressing my default template inside Obsidian so it doesn’t overwrite incoming webclippings). To me the fact that Obsidian is a viewer on top of regular text notes on my hard drive is valuable because I can use the files and manipulate them in other tools. I daily read and write those notes outside of Obsidian. It seems many others don’t realise this fully as there is the strong tendency to want and expect Obsidian to do everything (even though the dev team handily shifted that urge to the developers of plugins).

I will stick with the Markdownload webclipper for now.