Merlin Extension

It generally doesn't summarize well, takes excessive time to summarize and sometimes says it summarizes it with no output. The previous YouTube integration was much better. I can't use it in its current state. I've been reverting to Gemini summaries as they're quick and accurate. The timestamps are also not interactive, which seems like an oversight.

What the heck happened to the Merlin Extension. It defaults to "transcript" and if I click on "summary" and "summarize the whole video" it now opens up a side window that disappers if you go to another tab or open up another window. The previous options of summarize was great. Then if I wanted to dive deeper I could just click on key insights. And then even better I simply clicked on the last tab that created a sort of report. Now, I have to click on summarize the whole video. It now takes forever to get a summary. It is literally unusable now. It takes so long as "I will get the transcript for the first chapter"...then it just processess for forever. Please go back to the older format. It was fast, helped me make decisions about whether I should watch the whole video or not. I might as well just use co-pilot or gemini now. Here is what it looks like: Summarise this YouTube video chapter by chapter. Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite Watched the video Watched Deepseek drops another HUGE breakthrough 0:00–1:00 The user wants a chapter-by-chapter summary of the YouTube video "Deepseek drops another HUGE breakthrough." I will use the provided youtube_transcript tool to get the content for each chapter. First, I will get the transcript for the first chapter, "dSpark intro" (0:00 to 1:05). Watched 0:00–1:05 Watched 0:00–1:00 Watched Deepseek drops another HUGE breakthrough 0:00–1:05 Watched 0:00–25:23 Watched 0:00–1:00 Watched 0:00–1:00 Watched 0:00–1:00 Watched Deepseek drops another HUGE breakthrough 0:00–1:00 Watched 0:00–25:23 Watched 0:00–1:00 Watched the video Watched the video Watched 0:00–1:00 Watched 0:00–1:00 The user wants a chapter-by-chapter summary of the YouTube video. I should use the youtube_transcript tool to read each chapter. First, I will read the first chapter, which is from 0:00 to 1:05. Watched 0:00–1:05

You can no longer give a marked text as context to the extension, as the extension always looks at the entire tab and the entire website, which is sometimes useful, but not always sometimes I just want to give a marked text as context not the entire website. In addition, on some websites where there is an embedded window in which you can scroll, the text in the embedded area is not recognized. This is problematic because you can't mark the text and can only pass it on to the extension as context. The extension also no longer works with Opera GX and Opera, which is very annoying. It takes too many clicks to access your saved prompts — this is extremely annoying if you want to work quickly. With the very old interface, this was much better: After you had opened the extension with Ctrl + M, you could directly activate the saved prompt and start the work process with just one mouse click.

I've tried different models but Merlin just says that it's watching videos. And it keeps repeating this, seemingly showing different pieces. But those pieces seem to repeat and are not always the same (see attached screenshot). Most of the time now I'm not getting any answers anymore. No summaries, key takeaways and certainly no chatting with eg YouTube videos. Just a Merlin that is supposedly watching videos. I don't understand why it's doing that in the first place: The transcript is there and it could just extract the information from it. Merlin had been great for a few years but recently it has mostly become unusable.

Please please please go back to the old layout or allow me to revert back to the classic style. I can no longer add in files within the extension to help me with my work, it can't handle longer prompts any more, it's become severely handicapped. In one "upgrade" Merlin went from my most used tool to unusable. I have faith this will get fixed or I'm doing something wrong, but this update has ruined my experience.

But every time I click into the login page it redirects me to https://www.getmerlin.in/extension-installed . I can still chat in getmerlin.in/chat which indicates I have logged in.