Guide
The popup closed again. It doesn't have to.
You open the scraper, click the page to pick a field, and the popup is gone, taking the table with it. Every browser extension popup does this: the browser closes it the moment focus leaves it, and nothing an extension does can change that. What it can do is not live in a popup.
Why the popup closes
A toolbar popup belongs to the browser, not to the page. Chrome, Edge and Firefox close it whenever you click anywhere else, switch tabs or press Escape. That is fine for a quick export and frustrating for anything longer: picking fields by hand, watching a crawl, copying rows across.
Magic Scraper's rows live in the page, not in the popup, so closing it loses nothing; open it again and the table is still there. But not having to reopen it is better.
Two ways to keep it open
Pick the one that suits your screen.
Beside the page: the side panel
Press the pin button in the popup's header. Magic Scraper moves into the browser's side panel (the sidebar in Firefox), stays there while you click, scroll and pick, and follows the tab in front.
A window of its own next update
Press the window button next to the pin. Magic Scraper opens as a window with its own place in the taskbar: move it, resize it, put it on another screen, pin it. It reads the tab it was opened from.
In either, picking by hand works without anything closing: click the block your rows come from, shift-click extra fields, and the table updates as you go.
Side panel or window?
| Side panel | Own window | |
|---|---|---|
| Where | Beside the page, in the same window | Anywhere, its own window |
| Which tab it reads | Whichever tab is in front | The tab it was opened from |
| Taskbar | Part of the browser window | Its own entry, can be pinned |
| Best for | Working through several tabs | A big table on a second screen |
Reasonable questions
Why does my scraper extension close when I click the page?
Browsers close an extension's toolbar popup whenever focus leaves it. No extension can stop that, but Magic Scraper can move into the side panel, or open in its own window, which stay open.
Do I lose my data when the popup closes?
No. The rows are kept in the page; open the popup again and the table is still there.
How do I open Magic Scraper in its own window?
In the next update, press the window button in the popup's header, next to the pin. It opens as a separate window that you can move, resize and pin to the taskbar.
Does the side panel work in Firefox?
Yes: Firefox calls it the sidebar, and the same pin button opens it.