Spyware extension to replace a functional extension (sciwheel). This extension tracks all of your web browsing and shares and sells it to data brokers and other companies, including marketing agencies.

"Required permissions:

Access browser tabs
Access browser activity during navigation
Access your data for all websites"

'If the product is free, you are the product'. Wonder why everyone is complaining about the extension slowing down their browser? Maybe because its constantly scraping and recording everything you're doing..

There was a Q/A where they said they tried to put these concerns to rest, but their privacy statement says it all:

When We Share Your Information"
1) As Required by Law:
2) For Your Safety and Protection:

3) With Our Trusted Service Providers: We work with third-party service providers (e.g. cloud hosting, analytics, customer support platforms) who assist us in operating and improving our products. These providers are only allowed to use the information for the specific services we hire them for, act on our instructions, and are bound by strict contractual agreements to protect your data.

---- the wording is interesting here, "The providers are only allowed to use the information for the specific services we hire them for, act on our instructions..." This is intentionally vague and could be used for any reason...

4) In Business Changes: "If Technology from Sage (or a product line like Lean Library or Talis) is involved in a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or a portion of its assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction. You will be notified of any such change in ownership or use of your information."

---- As soon as the company changes hands, all your data belongs to someone else and its use has no limitations.

5) With Partners (Anonymised Data Only): We may disclose anonymised and aggregated data (data that cannot be linked back to you personally) with our partners or for marketing purposes. This helps us and our partners understand trends, improve access to academic materials, or enhance products without revealing your identity.

---- 1) True anonymisation is incredibly hard.. They collect device IDs, IP addresses, browsing patters, demographic information, etc., They do not outline how they will anonymize the data. When your name, birthday, or other personal or identifying information is collected, they do not specify how they will ensure *all instances of identifiable information* will be scrubbed before data is shared. Example: if you log in to LinkedIn and click on your profile, the new tab is named your full name and this is collected by them being able to 'Access browser tabs'. 2) They also say that the data, 'cannot be linked back to you personally' (which is false) and it can be linked to your devices which can be linked back to you. A single other dataset and this can be linked to all other existing data on you 3) "FOR MARKETING PURPOSES". This one is self explanatory, monetary incentive. 4) They do not say who the partners are.. could be anyone. Could be tech firms, ad firms, analytic firms 5) Once the data are shared with partners, you cannot have them deleted.

I almost gave this 1 star, because while LeanLibrary works well when it actually functions, the overall experience is frustrating. The add-on causes extremely long loading times, sometimes to the point where pages just break after a few minutes.

I do see the potential here, if these performance issues get resolved, this could easily be a 4/5 add-on. I also noticed the new feature that’s supposed to prevent it from running on non-library sites, but it doesn’t seem to work properly. It still loads on LinkedIn, social media, and entertainment sites where it shouldn’t.

Lots of promise, but at the moment it’s more hassle than help.

It's great at finding versions of papers that I can access through my university library account making it a very useful tool when researching. However it slows other sites down and often causes them to freeze so has to be kept uninstalled when not in use. Please fix this issue. I can't just pause it when not in use as it still slows down sites, please fix this.

Doesn't seem to find any of the articles on the page. Slows Github and Youtube to an absolute crawl. The extension it replaced, Sciwheel, did one thing and did it very well-- this tries to do more and accomplishes nothing, while slowing down everything else. Really bad start of the rebrand, folks.

Not a great extension, at best it merits 3/5 starts. HOWEVER it slows down every single website, sometimes freezing my entire PC for some absurd reason. I'd rather have a bookmarklet than this.

From reading the developer responses to other reviews, they have been aware of the issues and bloat of the add-on for years yet have not actually fixed these things.

It really feels like they got the product working and now are just cruising doing the bare minimum while reaping whatever money universities pay them.

Compared to the Sciwheel extension, this one is much more clunky and non-intuitive: it takes more clicks to save a citation, and it even took me a while to figure out how to save the citation in the first place. The number one thing I want from the extension is to save a citation. Nothing else. I don't want a pop up with the home page, I don't want to see statistics, I don't want hard-to-remove overlays that occlude content on the webpage. I just want to save citations so that I can write my research papers. Sciwheel did that. Lean Library gets in the way, which is frustrating. Moreover, I'm starting to encounter issues in various websites (not related to research) where Firefox hangs for a moment and an information bar pops up saying that Lean Library is slowing down Firefox. I removed Lean Library and will continue using the Sciwheel extension as long as it still works.

It's buggy, and it breaks some websites like: search dot nixos dot org

This would be a 5-star extensions if the performance wasn't so terrible, especially on websites like youtube or facebook where it shouldn't even be active. There really should be a way to create a blacklist of websites to disable the extension. The disable switches in the popup don't work most of the time, or have weird behaviour

Significantly slows down my browser, even on an M1 Max Macbook pro with 32gb of ram.

I would give the feature 4 stars, though the extension itself is lacking.
It's always on without an easy 'off' switch, meaning I have to manually go into my settings to turn it off, otherwise it bogs down my browser. It will often pop-up after I've already gotten to the intended page from clicking the provided link. If I click the pop-up, it opens the exact same page, again.
Overall I still find it incredibly useful, though its implementation is wanting.

The shortcut does "work" for me, as in, it allows me to access scientific literature though my university its library.

HOWEVER, That does not mean that this extention works well, far from it...

The extention is Always Active, with no options to change this. I would much rather have it off by default and activated upon request, or be able to manage sites it works on with either a whitelist or a blacklist...

The extention often causes a lot of slowdown on different sites, and also regularly pops up the "sign in to your institution" widget when visiting sites like wikipedia... as you might have guessed, I don't need a library log in on a site which gives me its information for free :/

It does the bare minimum which it promisses to do, so I won't give it one star, but man, would I like a better extention for this.....

when filling in the university I attend, it does not give any options to proceed. I want to log in with my university information, but except for filling in that I attend it I cannot do anything

This extension breaks my browser and other extensions like Mendeley Web Importer that i need for my scientific papers.

A genial passkey that really works great! No hassles. I had forgotten it until I got a new PC and suddenly met walls for every literature search. Strongly recommended! (I rarely write reviews, but those facing you on LL are unfair according to my experience.)

Stuck at loading screen

When it works it's great, but for me as a professor emerita trying to access remote materials is almost impossible. Most of the time my login and password are not accepted. I would appreciate it if it worked, but each time I try to use it, I have to download it again. This is not good tool, if it wastes so much time.

If only it worked properly. Half the times it doesn't want to load and needs me to re-boot it manually. Other times it doesn't let me choose my primary institution by automatically choosing another institution...

Buggy. Recently started forcing infinite redirect loops on IEEE and Taylor & Francis.