12 ms·

The most underused browser feature: reader mode

882 points by frenkel 5y ago

andy_ppp 5y ago
It’s good for night time reading too (i.e. it obeys dark mode), it’s a shame hacker news doesn’t seem to work with Safari’s reader mode though I guess it’s designed for article pages!
hhsbz 5y ago
I never use it because I know the process is automatic and I'm always afraid I will be missing part of the text or the pictures. I've found ad blockers to be more or less competent in removing the stupid European banners, but they are far from flawless. Some sites get stuck without a scroll bar for example
- frenkel 5y ago
  You should give it a try, I've never noticed any important parts missing.
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    Sometimes images are missing. Especially banner images, of course, and sometimes those illustrate the story, but I think also background-level images (that are used for non-background purposes, if you miss them, of course).
  - q-rews 5y ago
    I use Safari’s reader mode on Medium and it fails to load lazy-loaded images (unsurprisingly) so if I want to see those, I have to scroll down first and then enable the mode.
- perryizgr8 5y ago
  This is exactly why I don't use it either. Sometimes I have noticed that diagrams/images are stripped out. Sometimes a couple paragraphs at the end will be omitted.
  - sidpatil 5y ago
    I've noticed the same thing. Nowadays I quickly check the end of the article before switching to reader mode, to make sure it's still there.
- hlasdjlfhalwjk 5y ago
  > I'm always afraid I will be missing part of the text or the pictures As for missing pictures, my argument is, either the text is referring to an image that cannot be seen in reader mode, then I'll notice and switch back to normal mode to see the image, or the image is not relevant to the text, so I just don't care for it.
- aerojoe23 5y ago
  I use it for the text to speech in Firefox a lot. When there isn't a pay wall in the way I'll open the page in another tab while reader read's it to me. This way I can see the text and pictures the way they intended it to be. Another downside is that text content for other articles on the site that aren't part of the article, will be in the content. On the full site they'll be links or something and you just skip them with out thinking. In text to speech reader mode, it reads them off.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  There's no risk in invoking Reader Mode. If it doesn't render or omits text, you can simply toggle it off / navigate back to the native page. Images in online articles are irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the time --- 75%--95% or more. At best they're eye-candy or distractions. They occasionally provide context. Some serve as a contextual reminder. I'd suggest that information-critical graphics (there's information in the image that's not available from the article itself) are in the neighbourhood of 1% of all images. These tend to be graphs, plots, charts, or maps. They're also generally rendered by Reader Mode, unless the site is very poorly designed. TL;DR: This is an irrelevant concern.
627467 5y ago
Underused? I wish I could set the browser to be always in reader mode so I can save taps every day. Reader mode along with private mode is great paywall circumventer. In opera mobile you can save reader mode pages in mhtml, it's great alternative to webarchive
- severine 5y ago
  SevenSigns posted an addon to do that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287190 and there's an alternative here https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/automatic-reader... I don't use the automatic addons, but one that lets me right click and open directly in reader view, works a treat! https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/reader-view https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/reader-view Try them out!
Forge36 5y ago
The flag doesn't exist on mobile. There is another, but i didn't see it do anything. chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics Accessibly has a "show simplified view" which seems comparable
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Firefox for Android has reader mode.
  - x-sp 5y ago
    As does Opera
    - neop1x 5y ago
      and Brave (after enabling it in Settings)
  - throwthroyaboat 5y ago
    I remember it being a button in the URL bar, but now it's gone?
dijit 5y ago
I think I have to share my incredulation; I always use Reader Mode on Safari iOS: lots of sites are quite literally unreadable otherwise.
- FabHK 5y ago
  And, in both macOS and iOS Safari, you have a per-website-setting to request reader view automatically. It's great.
- opdahl 5y ago
  Quick tip on Safari iOS Reader View: Click and hold the 'aA' button on the address bar and it will go straight to reader view without you having to go through the menu and selecting it.
  - interpol_p 5y ago
    And if you tap "Website Settings" from the 'aA' popup (this is iOS 15, not sure where the setting lives in iOS 14, but it's somewhere there too), you can toggle "Use Reader Automatically" for the domain
- fckthisguy 5y ago
  I exclusively use reader mode on Firefox when reading news articles. So many site are borderline unusable otherwise due to all the ads, popups, cookie policies, and subscription promps.
  - LegitShady 5y ago
    …I just use adblockers.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      This isn't as effective as it was in the past now that anti-adblocking is practically universal.
eurasiantiger 5y ago
Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box.
- eganist 5y ago
  > Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box. Refresh while in reader mode. The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render, not before it reaches the web browser. Refreshing in reader mode prevents client side scripts from executing and rewriting the DOM. I'm presuming this is to be search engine friendly, but I'll leave it to the SEO experts to educate me. This is what I do with most sites.
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Disabling JS also often works for the same reason. (But reader mode is great, nothing against it.)
  - eurasiantiger 5y ago
    With iOS, for example, refreshing npr.org just turns off reader mode.
    - nojito 5y ago
      As you refresh it should change the address bar saying reader mode avaiable and you should be able to quickly hit the Aa icon on the top left.
      - eurasiantiger 5y ago
        They redirect to another subdomain, so I don’t think this will work. Thanks anyway!
  - subscribeNOW 5y ago
    > The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render This has changed for most major sites. Users behind the paywall are served a "truncated" version of the article that never included a full version of it. The days of "press Esc before it finishes loading!" are coming to an end it seems. The truncated version is still more SEO-friendly than a blank page as it has the headline and partial content.
aerojoe23 5y ago
I love reader mode in Firefox. It will also do text to speech for you. The voices seem to dependent on something built into the OS. They sound okay on windows and I haven't figured out how to get them to sound good on linux. On windows the voices sound good, but I Wish I could get it to go a little faster. The voices don't sound human so it takes some getting used to. On linux the voices just sound more harsh. To the point I don't want to use it. If anyone knows a switch to flip or how to install additional voices to make them sound better, that would be great.
- busymom0 5y ago
  For anyone interested, my hacker news app HACK does both reader node as well as read text to speech. It's brand new so any feedback is welcome: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.hack https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h... It's available on iOS too which uses the built in reader mode of safari.
  - AlexAndScripts 5y ago
    Just tried it out. I usually use Harmonic, and in general I much prefer the UI - it's more minimalistic, lower contrast, and I prefer the font (Product Sans). It also has a built in ad blocker. However, I appreciate the various filtering options / different feeds and the archive access seems like a really useful feature. On the whole I think I'll stick with Harmonic, but it looks like it has some potential.
    - busymom0 5y ago
      The settings in my app can be customized to make it as minimalist as needed (like hide favicons, hide the metadata, only show titles etc). There’s also settings for color choices and a setting to use lower contrast text. Font sizes and paragraph spacing can be changed to make it more compact. My app has a built in adblocker too for the built in browser. My app has reply push notifications too which I don’t think any of the other HN apps have. As for the font, Product Sans is not legally allowed to be used by third parties as far as I am aware: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can-i-use-the-font-product-sans-for-a-commercial-poster/115783#115783 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can... My app allows you to change fonts too and it supports Montserrat font which looks visually similar to Product Sans.
vanderZwan 5y ago
This doesn't even mention one of my favorite features of Firefox Android: if you bookmark a site in reader mode it gets saved as an off-line version
- severine 5y ago
  Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, that feature is deprecated in newer versions.
  - vanderZwan 5y ago
    Aaargh, it really feels like they're actively making their product worse lately
neebz 5y ago
In Safari you can set reader mode turned on for specified websites. I have done it for all the sites which I visit frequently. Unfortunately there is no way to to turn it on at global level. The only minor gripe I have is the slide-above animation when reader mode turns on. It's jarring when you keep getting that on each navigation.
- Jakob 5y ago
  You can turn it on globally by selecting: Preferences > Websites > Reader > When visiting other websites: On
fergie 5y ago
I always assumed that Reader Mode was used pretty heavily.
- w0m 5y ago
  i have read a total of 5 articles with it since introduction decade(s?) ago. The switch is just jarring
  - dev_tty01 5y ago
    You mean the switch away from useless eye candy, advertising, link farms, popups, slide down flaps, useless multi-page clicks, cookie consent popups and banners, ...? Yes, it is jarring, but in a good way. To each their own I guess.
beervirus 5y ago
I use reader mode all the time on Firefox at home or on Safari on my phone. I’m forced to use Chrome at work though, and I always thought it didn’t have this feature. Good to see it can be enabled.
thrower123 5y ago
The only time I ever use reader mode is when the iOS Twitter app automatically launches Safari in that mode for links that I open. Sometimes it's helpful, more often the website is hopelessly broken and I have to try disabling it and going back to normal mode a few times - it seems to toggle back to reader mode about half the time when I disable it. Or I give up and copy the url and open it in Brave instead.
robinoh 5y ago
reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r
- inanutshellus 5y ago
  TIL!
- noman-land 5y ago
  You are a god.
- perilunar 5y ago
  command-alt-r on Mac/FF command-shift-r on Mac/Safari
- arepublicadoceu 5y ago
  > reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r F9 on Windows I use it all the time.
Saint_Genet 5y ago
You also get around many paywalls by activating reader mode.
lastgeniusua 5y ago
Sadly Tridactyl (vim keybindings for Firefox) doesn't work in reader mode, which really breaks the flow of my usual scrolling/tab-switching with vim keys. This, and the pdf reader tabs kill me because of it
- bovine3dom 5y ago
  How much do you care? There's an open pull request you could give a little time to that would fix it by integrating a reader mode into Tridactyl here: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/pull/3306 https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/pull/3306 : )
  - lastgeniusua 5y ago
    don't really have much experience with JS or TS, but might try this later, thanks!
    - bovine3dom 5y ago
      If you're familiar with CSS, writing a decent stylesheet for it would be a big help. If you've no interest in JS/TS you could leave that part to me.
CrlNvl 5y ago
On FF, is there an extension that automatically turns on reader mode when you are reading an article?
- gizdan 5y ago
  Yes. I've been using Automatic Reader View[0]. Though, to be honest, this should be an option directly in Firefox. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
- forevercrashing 5y ago
  Here’s another one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-v...
rock_artist 5y ago
The title is maybe a little misleading? TL;DR - you can overcome so frustrating cookie permission popups and some invasive visual elements by using reader mode. However if we focus on the title, Reader Mode is a great feature (and I’m pretty sure many others followed by this title agree with that observation). I use it mostly on my mobile devices and it can greatly improve readability of something by controlling the text-formatting. Having said that, still many times (at least for me) it can resolve wrong translation for the content due to: * ignoring some divs in the page * in-ability to move to next pages (eg. hyperlinks) * bad RTL support I wish I would be able to use it more often. :)
jraph 5y ago
I use it from time to time but I would probably use it more often if reader mode was automatically restored on websites where I used it a first time (and didn't switch back). If the page is "good enough" when blocking ads (and I also have JS disabled by default), I won't bother using reader mode.
binkHN 5y ago
I might be the minority here, but this is why I use Edge on Windows. It's, basically, Chrome with a reader mode.
- EMM_386 5y ago
  Chrome apparently has a flag for this under chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode I tried flag in Brave ("brave://") but it is not working. Works great in Firefox.
  - asicsp 5y ago
    >Chrome apparently has a flag And even then the options were confusing: 'Enabled' and 'Enabled available in settings' I first tried with Enabled, didn't work. Then tried the settings option, which showed reader mode option under 'Appearance'. After turning on this setting, the icon shows up.
  - binkHN 5y ago
    I know this has been an on and off thing with Chrome, but, yes, it does appear to be back and works now.
  - thenanyu 5y ago
    works now in brave, the setting is extremely confusing, you have to set it to "enabled and available in settings"
specproc 5y ago
Also a neat way to scrape some sites, big love for readability.
tyingq 5y ago
Just tried it on chrome mobile. The only way to make it always there is to change the triggering mode to always. Which means an annoying popup at the bottom. And the output of it is usually not helpful. Only works on (some) things that look like an article. Otherwise, it's truncated content.
mvanbaak 5y ago
It's the only way to visit sites like medium.com ;P
Narishma 5y ago
I use it daily to deal with the epidemic of hard to read too low-contrast websites, which this article is ironically guilty of.
ldenoue 5y ago
Agreed 100%. Because in Safari it doesn’t work on all websites, I made ReaderView, an app that does and also saves articles for later plus lets you highlight passages. Give it a try https://www.appblit.com/readerview https://www.appblit.com/readerview
bvm 5y ago
I really love the reading the codebases for these, the original Arc90 Readability bookmarklet was really quite...readable when unminified.
- janandonly 5y ago
  I still use that JS script to make a pdf with all links written out fully at the bottom <lovely> Also, I usually use Printfriendly.com to turn this page into a small pdf for saving. That is if it's worth saving, of course.
pmontra 5y ago
A useful feature of Firefox reader mode on Android is that if you bookmark a page from inside reader mode, Firefox saves it locally and you can go back to it from the bookmarks even when you are offline. I used it to read long web pages (usually fiction) on planes or in the middle of nowhere. Edit: it works only on older Firefox versions. This feature was removed sometime in the last months.
- alkyon 5y ago
  Interesting, but doesn't seem to work for me.
  - pmontra 5y ago
    You're right. I checked with the new Firefox (the one with the "too many taps" GUI from one year ago) and it doesn't work anymore. I'm using the old Firefox on my main phone and it explicitly says "Saved offline" when I bookmark a Reader Mode page. The new Firefox on the backup phone says "Bookmark saved". One more reason to stay on the old Firefox.
    - _1a 5y ago
      This was one of the features I was actually sad to see go when I updated Firefox. I used this feature a lot as it was mainly manuals that I was saving. They also replaced the default start page to be Collections instead of bookmarks, which b of course for me was empty. I think I've got used to the new layout that I probably won't downgrade just for the offline capabilities.
    - morsch 5y ago
      Yup, it didn't make the transition to Fenix. That was such a cool feature. Maybe I should downgrade.
- spupy 5y ago
  That sounds almost exactly like the functionality that Firefox' Pocket provides. The app downloads a reader view of everything you put in there so you can read offline.
shandor 5y ago
My most wanted feature for Firefox right now is the ability to right-click (or long-press on mobile) the link and choose "Open Link in Reader mode" exactly like they already offer for "open Link in New Private window". I think that would be even more important than the Private shortcut, with the amount of unnecessary crap the websites try to cram on your screen.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  I implemented this for TenFourFox and it's a real godsend for certain sites. Meanwhile, there's this, but not Android-compatible: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader-view/
  - shandor 5y ago
    Thanks for the addon! Just for the sake of curiosity, what do you think it would take for your addon to be ported to work also on Android?
    - CodesInChaos 5y ago
      Afaik firefox mobile only allows a small number of whitelisted extensions.
      - nick__m 5y ago
        there is a way¹ to install other addon (if you use firefox nightly) but it is downright user-hostile. 1- https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-add-on-in-firefox-nightly-for-android-but-it-is-complicated/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...
    - classichasclass 5y ago
      Not mine, so I haven't looked at it closely. In general, however, I think there are many more addons that could work, and should work on Android.
midjji 5y ago
Nice
jonplackett 5y ago
Does no one else user reader mode? I’ve found it the only way to stay sane on sites where ad blockers don’t work.
- oefnak 5y ago
  Which adblocker do you use? With ublock origin I almost never encounter sites where ads are visible.
  - jonplackett 5y ago
    Only happens on mobile sometimes, and when a site forces you to turn it off to function. I'm on ublock too any other time! I feel a deep sense of pity for anyone still surfing the web unprotected!
AdmiralAsshat 5y ago
> I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default. What? The browser made by the company that derives 90% of its revenue from ads doesn't want to show you a button that can remove the ads? I am shocked!
abrowne 5y ago
Personally, I found reader mode missed just enough — like images loaded with js or footnotes referenced in an article — that it was more trouble than it was worth. And as much as I liked the "readability", I missed missed seeing the different designs, fonts and so on. (Who would want to read all books with exactly the same layout and typeface‽) Now I have a collection of user stylesheets I use with Stylus to improve sites I read a lot. I especially often remove fixed toolbars and adjust font size and line height. I also use the browser zoom feature a lot to get one-off sites to a better reading text size.
- visarga 5y ago
  Not just footnotes but also comments. I never saw a reader mode app that handles comments. I would use it to switch on TTS and have the comments read aloud, this increases my focus. Well, actually I have my own hand-made reader mode that works with comments as well, implemented as a bookmarklet about 10 years ago. But other tools can't handle reddit and hacker news for reading aloud.
ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
I use it often. Lots of sites have become wise to its use for bypassing paywalls, but it does work, occasionally, to get past a required sign-in. It's good for downloading sites as PDF.
GrumpyNl 5y ago
The icon doesnt show on chrome latest version.
- frenkel 5y ago
  Did you enable it in the settings?
tangoalpha 5y ago
I have been using reader-mode on Firefox and Chrome for long. Not just for better readability, but also most content behind paywalls is accessible with readermode. (May be because, most of the paywalls on news websites load all initial content, and then either truncate the content or hide the content using javascript, and hitting the paywall renders the page again without a lot of the CSS and JS that is used for hiding the content behind the paywall). Hopefully, this content doesn't have those paywall service providers to start working around reader modes.
k1m 5y ago
Any developers who'd like to contribute to improving how article content is extracted from web pages should check out Mozilla's Readability repository: https://github.com/mozilla/readability https://github.com/mozilla/readability I'm currently trying to bring the PHP port up to speed here: https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php We use an older version as part of our article extraction for Push to Kindle: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/ https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/
- infogulch 5y ago
  ArchiveBox is a tool that downloads web pages and saves them in various different formats: warc, pdf, rendered png, plain text. I wonder what it uses for plain text extraction and if the readability repo would be useful for that purpose. Edit: Oh neat it does actually. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#save_readability https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#... > Archive method SAVE_READABILITY > Extract article text, summary, and byline using Mozilla's Readability library. Unlike the other methods, this does not download any additional files, so it's practically free from a disk usage perspective. It works by using any existing downloaded HTML version (e.g. wget, DOM dump, singlefile) and piping it into readability.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    That's pretty amazing it already does it. ArchiveBox and the other stuff from the "DIY no-credentials don't-care-about-the-rules" web archiving community, like ArchiveTeam.... continues to astound me with it's quality and "professionalism" (as a credentialed professional in the field of digital library stuff... they are often outdoing the actual credentialed professional community).
    - nikisweeting 5y ago
      Aww thank you!
- up6w6 5y ago
  I believe the Instant View[1] crowdsourcing model where people write templates for each website could boost a lot these parsers (hope they open source it soon). Its just impossible to make these extensions work for every single website with some simple heuristics. Check the codebase of some popular parsers: Firefox (already mentioned): https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readability.js https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readabili... Google Chrome: https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller Mercury parser: https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser [1] https://instantview.telegram.org/ https://instantview.telegram.org/
emaro 5y ago
I love the reader modes accross the different browsers. Especially Safary Mobile does a really good job, i.e. even expands the partitioned articles from golem.de into one single page. What slightly but consistently bothers me, is that the reader view in Firefox has very little customization options and (in my eyes) doesn't look very appealing. They should let a designer improve the stylesheet. You also cannot force the reader mode like in Pocket. I also want to mention the instant view feature of Telegram [0]. It can be used as a reader view as well. [0] https://instantview.telegram.org/ https://instantview.telegram.org/
clipradiowallet 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of reader mode! On a few sites that the adblocker can't work on - or sites that won't work because of the adblocker...reader mode is usually the only way for me to see the content. Example, wall street journal and some other mainstream news sites will obscure the article with a paywall, but reader mode shows it in entirety.
chrismorgan 5y ago
In Firefox this is implemented as about:reader?url=…, and you can use that URL to load reader mode even on pages that aren’t detected as compatible (so that the reader mode toolbar button doesn’t appear). This used be the URL on Firefox for Android as well, but if I recall correctly (I seldom use reader mode) it got changed in the Fenix world so that it’s a moz-extension:// URL.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  I used to enter about:reader URLs all the time for pages that Firefox Android wouldn't show the button for. Do you know where the moz-extension:// incantation for this is? I would think it's a constant UUID, so maybe I just need to page through the source. There really should be an option for "always let me try Reader Mode."
refracture 5y ago
Reader mode on Firefox for iPad OS is wonderful, gets rid of everything but the text I want and it feels like reading an eBook.
kjr247 5y ago
Doesn't work on Chromium Brave. /tries not to cry /lays on the floor and cries alot
dusted 5y ago
I love reader mode, but I can't for the life of me get it to work everywhere on my site, and there's no way to hint to the browser that I want to support it, or supply additional helpful metadata.
jeromenerf 5y ago
Dammit, don’t tell everyone, they will notice it.
blunte 5y ago
I use it on my phone all the time. It almost makes phone browsing tolerable. It's great for getting rid of Medium crap and other FUBAR sites. Plus it typically makes the text larger, so I can read it without glasses.
- lowercased 5y ago
  same here - it will default to a good size font and high contrast dark mode. i've found myself using it... a lot over the last few months. i picked up a new 12 mini, and as I was developing new habits, this became one of them. if something is more than one screen of text, i reach for reader mode.
classichasclass 5y ago
Reader View is excellent on low-spec systems. On TenFourFox you can try any page in Reader View, not just what the browser thinks will work. I also implemented sticky reader view, where going to links stays in reader mode even on different sites until you explicitly leave reader view (see https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/09/tenfourfox-fpr27b1-available-now-with.html https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/09/tenfourfox-fpr27b1-a... ) and auto reader view by domain or by domain subpages ( https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2021/03/tenfourfox-fpr31b1-available-now-with.html https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2021/03/tenfourfox-fpr31b1-a... ). Combined with a right-click to Open in Reader View menu option, this means you can jump right in and spend less time waiting for pages to load on older computers.
- freediver 5y ago
  "Sticky Reader View" is an excellent idea! Perhaps there is no need for both sticky and auto reader view settings. As soon as the user enabled auto reader view, you assume Sticky mode and enable auto reader view on any domains they subsequently visit (and render in reader mode successfully at least once?)
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    TenFourFox uses sticky mode by default anyway. But you make a good point for others who might implement such a feature.
everdrive 5y ago
I use this all the time and it's wonderful! It's not underused here. A LOT of the time a webpage will be completely broken / filled with ads / javascript / and other useless garbage. One click and I'm in reader mode, and all that junk is gone and I just have nice clean text, and perhaps a couple of images. Makes me wonder if I can set reader mode automatically for certain pages.
- krylon 5y ago
  There used to be an extension for Firefox called "Open in reader mode" that adds an item to the context menu for links to... well, open them in reader mode. It's not quite what you want, but I found it to be very helpful. I haven't used it in a couple of years, though, so I do not know if it is still around/maintained.
stiltzkin 5y ago
Highly recommend Instant View on Telegram: https://instantview.telegram.org/ https://instantview.telegram.org/ You can make your site and pages compatible with Instant View, also there are bots which can export pages to Telegra.ph which are also Instant View compatible.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
inetknght 5y ago
I used reader mode for a long time and liked it but stopped using it because it still let javascript run.
pre 5y ago
I press it as soon as I see a popup about cookies or login or sales or basically anything at all. I press it when there's a paywall. I press it when the site doesn't do dark-mode. I press it when adverts become annoying. There also exists an auto-reader-mode plugin that you can tell to always open that site in reader-mode in future. Reader mode is great. Hope it doesn't become popular so website start trying to stop it working.
zelphirkalt 5y ago
I use it on a daily basis. Without it a lot of websites are unusable for me. I just want to read the content, I do not wish to see the ads or interactive whatever. I want content. It is especially helpful, when websites manage to become unreadable without loading JS, because somehow they screwed up their CSS so badly, or it does not exist, without loading JS. Reader mode basically saves those websites from becoming instantly closed tabs.
- Kim_Bruning 5y ago
  I recently started using this too. Now why can't websites just be written to work this way in the first place?
black3r 5y ago
I use this all the time on mobile just to bypass pop-ups, videos and other annoyances I don't want to see when reading articles.
nayuki 5y ago
Firefox's reader mode can bypass paywalls on many news sites (e.g. The Economist). It's simple to activate; press F9 and then F5.
rodolphoarruda 5y ago
I'm an absolute heavy user of reader mode in Firefox, not only for reading content per se, but to clean up content before I copy/paste it into Evernote. I just love the feature.
- ryanianian 5y ago
  I find Evernote's web clipper (browser extension) to usually do a job either comparable to or better than Firefox's web clipper. Clipper > Clip Format > Article. It used to be pretty bad but they've made it a lot better in the past few months. It also has the benefit of storing the source url in the note and creating the new note from scratch which you don't get by copy/pasting into a new note.
markus_zhang 5y ago
I always choose reader mode on mobile if applicable. I'm wondering why some websites don't have reader mode.
- npteljes 5y ago
  It's based on the browser detecting whether Reader Mode is applicable for the content. If it's neatly organized into headers, paragraphs, etc, then it will be available. If it's unorganized on a technical level, the browser might not pick it up correctly.
  - markus_zhang 5y ago
    Thanks that's probably the case!
DangitBobby 5y ago
> When available for a website, it is displayed as an icon at the end of the url bar in Firefox This is the only problem. When I really want it, it's often not available. archive.is is pretty bad on mobile because they are archiving desktop pages. Reader mode is not available there.
egypturnash 5y ago
Honestly now that I think about it it's kind of surprising that Chrome has a reader mode button at all; why would a company whose business is mostly "serving ads" want to make it easier for you to get rid of them?
- HeckFeck 5y ago
  Sssh, a Chrome PM might be reading!
  - fsflover 5y ago
    So more people will switch to Firefox, good!
    - otterley 5y ago
      Whose primary funding comes from Google.
sysadm1n 5y ago
How does a browser's reader mode carve out the bit you want to read and ignore menus and other cruft? Does it scan for semantic elements like `<main> / <article>` or something and then serve up the 'meat' of the article?
- js2 5y ago
  More or less. Here's various implementations: https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability Original JS library: https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js/readability.js https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js... Specifically see here: https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js/readability.js#L704 https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...
mastrsushi 5y ago
I use reader mode anytime I come across an informative webpage. That being said, I always use it as the precious feature it is, presuming it will be removed either over lack of use and support or effect on ad market.
bambax 5y ago
> The same is true for Chrome, but you first need to enable it at chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode Oh... I didn't know that! I mosty use FF and reader mode is a big reason why. Reader mode is so much better for reading text... Also on mobile. The only weird behavior (on FF) is that it's a step forward in history; whey you press "back" you don't go back to the previous page, but to the current page in normal mode (with zero info in the url bar or anywhere else (that I could find)).
corentin88 5y ago
I’m a huge fan of the reader mode on Safari for iOS. Probably the feature that I’m using the most, right after password autocompletion.
BeetleB 5y ago
Reader mode really helps me in printing as well. Old comment of mine: Printing is something I started to do some months ago. Instead of keeping the tab open for weeks, I decided I'd print anything I want to read and place it a physical "inbox". Some tips: I print 2 pages to a side, so 4 pages per printer paper. Even long articles don't use too much paper, and for my eyes it's still readable (there are a few articles where I need to enlarge first). I print using either Firefox's "Simplify Page" feature or its "Readability" feature. This removes almost all the noise: No ads, no menus, etc. It's just the article and relevant images. Similar to reading a physical newspaper. It's been a game changer. I can now read wherever I want. Going to the mechanic? I just take some of these printed articles with me. I find myself taking notes on the paper - something I would not do well on the computer screen. My eyes get a lot less strain. Once you get used to this, there's no going back. Now when I see an article through a web browser, it's just ugly. Too many distractions. Even the menus are annoying. I didn't realize I'd been putting up with filth for so long. I initially worried that my inbox would get full and I'd have the same mental angst, and my plan was that if it happens, I'll take a random bunch and throw it in the recycle bin. But it never came to that - I still manage to read everything I print. Somehow, the physical inbox weighs less on my mind than the virtual one. I don't feel I need to deal with this inbox. It's OK if it just sits there collecting dust. Bad for the environment. Good for the brain.
- ratioprosperous 5y ago
  Doing exactly this with a large format e-ink tablet has been revolutionary for me
  - eagleislandsong 5y ago
    Which e-ink tablet would you recommend?
    - mariusor 5y ago
      Kobo devices have out of the box integration with Pocket, which Mozilla supports natively.
matthewfelgate 5y ago
I discovered Reader Mode on Chrome a few months ago and have used it a lot since. I use it everyday and it makes it much easier to read articles.
soheil 5y ago
I use Reading List feature to save articles that I want to listen to later during a run or workout. I made https://per.quest https://per.quest to listen to any URL. I wish there was a rss feed provided by the browser for Reading List feature so I could listen to articles one after another. I also stopped using reader mode for sites with insane ads/videos/js/popovers that hog the browser and just open them with per.quest/read/[URL] to extract just the article text.
timwis 5y ago
I always worry about missing bits like code samples in iframes when switching to reader mode :/
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aimor 5y ago
Firefox USED to allow accessing reader mode by prepending the url with 'about:reader?url='. This doesn't work anymore and I don't know what to use instead. There is a reader mode button that toggles it on and off, but some websites redirect or change the content before I can click the button. Sometimes the button just doesn't appear (why not, reader mode usually works fine). Refreshing the page sometimes works, if the website doesn't redirect or change the address. Is there some other way to force reader mode before the page load?
- Arnavion 5y ago
  >Firefox USED to allow accessing reader mode by prepending the url with 'about:reader?url='. This doesn't work anymore and I don't know what to use instead. Prepending `about:reader?url=` works for me, but only for pages that Firefox shows the button on anyway. For pages where it doesn't show a button, prepending `about:reader?url=` says "Failed to load article from page", which is to be expected because... >Sometimes the button just doesn't appear (why not, reader mode usually works fine). ... the Reader Mode script uses heuristics to identify if the document has an article. So it can't work on a document where it can't find an article to extract.
  - aimor 5y ago
    That's interesting, maybe this is the results of a change regarding when the button is shown, or simply in how reader mode works? Previously we have had success in forcing reader mode when the option is not available. See, for example: https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-enable-reader-view-in-mozilla-firefox/ https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena...
Lio 5y ago
Best thing for me about Reader mode is banishing annoying scrollback menu flaps. Nothing worse than trying to position a long form text article and a pointless menu flap popping up to obscure the text. So you then have to perform another round of up/down to get the page in the right place. It's not even as if modern browsers, either desktop or mobile, don't give you a way to quickly jump to the top of the page where you can see the menu.
larodi 5y ago
one little known feature of reader mode, no matter if firefox's or safari/mobile is that more often than you would expect, it kind of magically goes through pay-walls. so you get to see articles that require subscription or payment or else, with a single click. this happens so often that makes one wonder whether is due to some devs being lazy (hiding the actual content) or is by intent kept for savvy readers. also does great job getting through nasty full-screen cookie consent banners. basically is a glitter of hope for the web as a whole. btw, was thinking about article like this one for some weeks now. great minds think alike, right :)
- subscribeNOW 5y ago
  > whether is due to some devs being lazy or is by intent kept for savvy readers Neither, the business value isn't there, not enough people use Reader Mode to warrant spending the dev time to close the hole. It's coming soon though, and I'm building it. Sorry!
- GrinningFool 5y ago
  The less we talk about great things like reader mode, the longer it will be before it's broken by default on the websites that need it most.
- mcswell 5y ago
  I'm using Vivaldi, which is like Chrome but with a far better UI. It has a reader mode, which afaict does not help with the paywall at The Economist. Perhaps it's because if you pay for a subscription there, the full article is at a second link?
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underdeserver 5y ago
I read this post on reader mode.
vermaden 5y ago
Today's web is unusable without these two: - uBlock Origin - I Do Not Care About Cookies The latter can also be configured for uBlock: https://majkiit.github.io/polish-ads-filter/#i_dont_care_about_cookies https://majkiit.github.io/polish-ads-filter/#i_dont_care_abo...
Meph504 5y ago
I use it all the time to avoid a lot of modal popup article blockers and the like.
sprkwd 5y ago
Not in my house it's not. A lot of sites are practically unreadable without reader mode these days.
ZachSaucier 5y ago
Shameless plug: I maintain a cross-browser reader extension that is like reader mode with some additional features. It's called Just Read: https://justread.link/ https://justread.link/
- freediver 5y ago
  Looks great! What does this use underneath? How is it different than Readability.js in terms of parsing output?
  - ZachSaucier 5y ago
    It uses a pretty simple text selection algorithm I've developed through trial and error: https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Just-Read/blob/6dcb4f05b93287b0ec64744604a875967246b1e0/content_script.js#L670 https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Just-Read/blob/6dcb4f05b93287... I don't know how it compares to Readability.js.
    - freediver 5y ago
      Hey that works pretty well for such a simple implementation! Good job!
beyondcompute 5y ago
Reader mode in mobile Safari is basically one of the two things that keep me on iOS (the other one is dictation).
Razengan 5y ago
While we’re on this subject, why the hell is HN so hostile to readability? No dark mode, minuscule font, easy to mistap the tiny “buttons”, and no support for Reader Mode
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  HN is managed very conservatively from a UI/UX perspective. I share several of your concerns. You can contact the mods directly at hn@ycombinator.com One suggestion that is apparently in the pipeline is for a user-provided custom CSS which could be used to fix font, contrast, and other aspects. The underlying structure of HN pages (nightmare table-based layout) makes more substantial revisions difficult. There are numerous alternative-interface projects using the HN API as well.
hollerith 5y ago
The main reason reader mode is "underused" is that for a substantial fraction of pages, it does not work. Because of the way the human motivational architecture works, if there were a reader mode that always worked, its rate of usage would be many times higher than the usage rates of the current crop of reader modes. But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web. By "competing with the web", I mean creating online services that take the attention of users away from the web for some subset of things the web is used for, e.g., consuming static textual content, also known as reading. Gemini would be an example of an attempt to compete with the web, and it has the property that every page is essentially automatically in reader mode. The trick is to find some desire that the web is currently bad at satisfying, then improving Gemini to cater to that desire. For example, TOR was created (many years ago) by the US military to give its employees a way to browse the web without revealing their browsing history to the spy agencies of the US's enemies. But maybe Gemini's much greater simplicity would enable it to make a stronger guarantee of user privacy than the web is able to guarantee. (The more complicated a web browser gets, the harder it becomes to make privacy or security guarantees -- particularly guarantees of interest to only a small fraction of the web's users.) If that were the case, then whoever needs that stronger guarantee would tend to become avid users and proponents of Gemini. Getting very small numbers of avid users is considered an effective way to start increasing the number of users of a new online service. The idea I just described is probably a bad idea: there are probably other desires that Gemini or some other non-web service could cater to that are much more effective ways of creating avid users of that non-web service. (For example, the idea I just described has the disadvantage that even if the proposed improved version of Gemini could make stronger privacy guarantees than the web can (which seems unlikely to me) good luck convincing the average user who is not a security professional of that fact.) Finding them is hard! But trying to find one is a more potent way to try to improve things IMO than trying to fix or improve the web is.
- kixiQu 5y ago
  https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi > Gemini is not intended to replace either Gopher or the web, but to co-exist peacefully alongside them as one more option which people can freely choose to use if it suits them. In the same way that some people currently serve the same content via gopher and the web, people will be able to "bihost" or "trihost" content on whichever combination of protocols they think offer the best match to their technical, philosophical and aesthetic requirements and those of their intended audience.
agumonkey 5y ago
On i remember how often I used printfriendly just for that. Also I find the irony of reader mode quite funny. Lets build the most dynamic and capable presentation system so we can go relive bbs
tomiplaz 5y ago
My favourite and often used browser feature (Firefox).
kixiQu 5y ago
I gotta go back and figure out if I can submit a PR to fix footnotes, though [1]. I don't like using Reader Mode when I know there might be stuff missing, so I itch to go and check. [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/654 https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/654
robotburrito 5y ago
Reader mode is awesome and it makes a lot of the web actually usable.
jrochkind1 5y ago
I had no idea this was an option in Chrome, you just had to turn on a flag to enable it! I am interested... also interested in if it gets past various paywall attempts.... Is there any way to get it on Android stock Chrome?
mperham 5y ago
My advice to bloggers: if your blog readability is improved by activating Reader mode, you have a styling bug to fix. Two universal improvements: 1. Bump up your font size. 2. Increase contrast.
- nicbou 5y ago
  3. Remove all the crap that isn't the article the user came for I don't use Reader mode for readability, but to remove all the clutter on the page.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    It's not absolutely necessary to remove it, but when reading the article it should not be front-and-centre on the page. That means: - Single-column layouts. Sidebars suck. - No fixed-position elements. Especially not headers or footers, though fixed sidebars are also almost always a mistake. (There can be some benefit for reference / tools, but only about one time in a thousand that they're actually used.) On desktop, I disable all of these with either CSS (Stylish) or uMatrix element blocker. I've given up on any nuance here. If it's a choice of fixed header/footer or none at all, it's none at all. - A static set of nav or informational links above or below the main article text is acceptable. It's present, but doesn't interfere with the reading flow. - Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already.
    - omaranto 5y ago
      > - Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already. You mean you want two scrollbars? One from the web page and one from the browser window. That seems like an odd choice.
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Presently the fashion appears to be none. Worse: the scrollbars which do exist are indicator-only, they cannot be used to actually navigate on the page. On the four mobile devices I routinely have access to, none has an actual grabbable persistent scrollbar for navigation. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511
jrochkind1 5y ago
The "first example"[1] now 404s. Weird. So can't actually see the demo the OP wanted to demo.... [1]: https://techdows.com/2015/02/enable-test-reader-mode-firefox-nightly.html https://techdows.com/2015/02/enable-test-reader-mode-firefox...
- Raineer 5y ago
  Well I'm sure it's seeing a lot more traffic than the website intended.
ximm 5y ago
> The web has been plagued by cookie consent popups and banners since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect. It has become obvious that no user would willingly consent to the overuse of cookies since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect. Here, I fixed that for you.
SubiculumCode 5y ago
I love reader mode and use it a lot, but my biggest complaint is that sites seem to be able to control when the option appears in the browser, or if not, it seems to only appear after the site has finished loading.
dredmorbius 5y ago
I'm a huge fan of Readability Mode and use it often. It's proof that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. For those who are using e-ink devices, or even just standard tablets, EInkBro is another immensely useful tool. Yes, it's a standalone browser, not a mode on Firefox, Safari, Vivalti, etc. https://github.com/plateaukao/browser https://github.com/plateaukao/browser (Available through Google Play, F-Droid and other sources. Android-only, sorry iOS fans.) What it offers over standard browsers is that it's optimised for e-ink displays. That is, it favours pagination over scrolling, runs to full-screen, can easily adjust font size up or down (no more itsy-bitsy-teen-weenie-yellow-polka-dot HN fonts), bold text, and has its own reader mode as well. Even on a standard tablet, some of these features are a huge step above and beyond the mainstream browsers. The feature-set is limited, some of the UI is a bit rough, and a few things are just plain broken (if you need to edit entries in the JS or Cookie enabled/disabled sites ... you have to delete all data and start over again). That said, my usage is evolving from sending individual pages to EInkBrow when I want to do long-form reading, to using it at least part-time as a primary browser. (Mozilla Fennec Fox is my first choice, still.) The browser is stable and very much usable despite this. The developer is responsive to requests and bug reports. What's most refreshing is that the design principle is readability of Web content, as determined by the user, and not by the page author or publisher.
- jabroni_salad 5y ago
  Thanks for linking that, I'm going to try it on my reader when I get home. I like my boox for most things I try to use it for, but right now the pain point is all the royalroad webnovels I'm addicted to.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    I have both Mozilla Pocket and EInkBro on the BOOX. My preference is to read in EInkBro. Pocket's craptastic pagination is endless frustration. (I still use Pocket to save/tag content. But for what's supposed to be an enhanced readability tool, it's increasingly insufficient.)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
puttycat 5y ago
My workflow in case of a long article I want to read on my Kindle without distractions: View in reader mode --> Save as PDF --> Send to Kindle email address --> Sync Kindle. I wish this could be automized.
- jtth 5y ago
  Instapaper has this, and can even be set up to send a weekly digest.
AlexCoventry 5y ago
Is there a keyboard shortcut for reader mode, in chrome?
- thamer 5y ago
  If you use macOS, it's also in the menu bar in the View menu. This means that you can define an app-specific keyboard shortcut in Preferences > Keyboards > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Then click [+] and select Chrome as the application, then type "Enter Reader Mode" (exactly like it appears in the menu, and without quotes) and choose a shortcut. I'd also recommend adding one for "Exit Reader Mode" since the option changes to this text once you are in reader mode. You can use the same shortcut, it's fine since the two options are never present at the same time. This works for pretty much all apps, by the way.
  - AlexCoventry 5y ago
    Thanks. I'm on Ubuntu, though.
zzo38computer 5y ago
I would want to use my own styles or just the default HTML styles, as one (I don't want it to use big font sizes, narrow text, etc; I want to use my own settings please, and you can use your own settings please). But also, will wanting ARIA view, where the accessible tree is formatted (this would also allow forms, etc to work). However, the accessible tree seems to be missing some important information too, such as whether or not text is fixpitch, strong, emphasis, etc (as far as I can tell it is missing, anyways; trying a simple web page with different formatting and displaying the accessible tree seems to lose this information). Sometimes simply disabling CSS and JavaScripts fixes it a lot, and avoids a lot of annoyances. Some forms don't work if CSS is disabled, because they replace the widgets with their own (I really don't like this); the ARIA attributes are there though, which is supposed to allow it to display it properly even if the styles are disabled, but simply disabling CSS won't do that; it is necessary to parse the ARIA attributes too. But to do better might require both the accessible tree and the DOM tree.
stuartd 5y ago
You can set iOS Safari to default to reader mode for all websites in Safari/Website settings/Reader/All websites Then for sites you don’t want to use reader mode in, you turn ‘User reader automatically’ off in the site settings.
kazinator 5y ago
I started making more use of reader more upon discovering that it can get around paywalls in many cases.
yepthatsreality 5y ago
I wonder if low usage will lead it to eventually be removed (for example no one cares to maintain the feature code), much like the previous “reader mode” feature: RSS support. Will we say “that’s fine browsers should only focus on one thing”?
funnyThing7 5y ago
“I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default.” Damn right. You can bet you ass Google doesn’t want to actively push users away from bloated pages filled with ads.
obscuren 5y ago
I’ve always been puzzled by the “You accept these cookies” banners. Some have an ‘accept’ and ‘don’t accept/let me choose’ and some even come with a ‘X’ to close the banner. So what does it mean when I either click the ‘X’ or simply do nothing and leave the banner there while I read the article? What does it mean when I use reader mode and basically ignore the question whether I accept them or not?
- epse 5y ago
  You have not explicitly given your consent to tracking / cookies so there should be none
bogomipz 5y ago
Could someone explain how Reader Mode on iOS devices is able to bypass login walls for new sites?
acsigen 5y ago
An even cooler feature which the reader has in Edge for Windows is that it can read the articles aloud with a natural voice. Also useful to listen to PDFs
therealmarv 5y ago
Did not know that there is a reader mode in Chrome. It has only one bug: It does not work together with Google Translate :( I used in the past mainly Reader View because it does not need access/injection to all your web pages https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabifbgmdmgdllomnfinbmaellmclnh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabif... another extension I used (which worked better sometimes) was a local copy/fork of Rocket Readability https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rocket-readability/fhckbdfnalikpmcmcpcpkkdlhabngbod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rocket-readability... I forked it because I code reviewed it and it needs access to all your web sites. I don't want any surprise update happen with that extension. Seems I still need it for foreign articles+Google Translate.
spullara 5y ago
This is my most loved feature of Safari missing from Chrome by default. Edge has added it recently.
maddyboo 5y ago
I love reader mode but I don’t use it when reading technical content because it lacks syntax highlighting. I’ve also often encountered bugs where certain graphics that are core the the article won’t be shown and I will be confused until I turn off reader mode and see what I was missing. But for non-technical articles, it usually works fine.
Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago
What do you mean, 'underused'??? I can't live without it and use it for almost anything, where it works! Not works to read comments on HN, unfortunately. It also helps against most register-to-read popups, and against advertising-infested websites that fool all adblockers.
solarkraft 5y ago
Is there something like reader mode as a service (with TLS > 1.3 support)? It’d allow me to relatively comfortably read web articles on my Kindle Touch, which has a software stack that was already outdated when it came out a decade ago.
datavirtue 5y ago
On mobile it is under Settings,Accessibility, Simplified View.
Pasorrijer 5y ago
Fun fact! Reader mode also sidesteps some paywalls on news sites.
innagadadavida 5y ago
I have the same problem reading emails on my small screen phone. This in spite of the fact that emails contain a text representation of the message in addition to the formatted version. The default mail client on iPhones can be improved a lot but it doesn’t look like it’s getting any attention at all.
noobermin 5y ago
Underused? I use it for almost every article I open.
AYBABTME 5y ago
Firefox's reader mode is amazing, especially if you need to read long content; their text-to-speech tool works very well and I use Firefox in large part because of it. On Chrome, a startup named Speechify has a (crappy/intrusive) extension. They also have a decent iOS app, for ebooks, PDF and mobile web browsing... but their pricing structure is ridiculously expensive (also their annoying marketing feels like a giant ego trip/self promotional mania from the founder/CEO). However their voices are slightly better than the OS's.
fomine3 5y ago
IMO most underrated browser feature is "Create shortcut" on Chromium. It can make any website to app-style window and create shortcut, so it can be pinned to Windows taskbar. So it can virtually replace some Electron apps to just a window for web version, so we can save system resources used by each Electron Chromium instances. It's also useful that shares browser profile, and extensions like ad blocker and password manager. Sadly Firefox truncated similar feature. It's deal breaker for me. https://superuser.com/questions/468580/create-application-shortcut-chromes-feature-in-firefox https://superuser.com/questions/468580/create-application-sh... I wish more Chrome users use this to avoid the feature removed.
- noisy_boy 5y ago
  Agreed - this allows me to run WhatsApp on Linux (as much as I don't want to, everyone I need to interact with is using it) in a chromium window like an app.
- mackrevinack 5y ago
  i was using a think called ICE SSB with firefox 2 years ago but when i updated linux/pop os it stopped working. i think it was made by the crowd who make peppermint os anyway, as i was searching for that i came across this article. i just skimmed it but it seems like feature might be coming back? https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-firefox/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-... i think the ICE SSB thing is better though. it lets you add a custom icon and you can search/launch them along with your other desktop apps
michaelcampbell 5y ago
I haven't used it a lot, but have started with the increase in posts here using the absurd "lite" CNN links. I use a wide monitor, and these full-width text only splats are really difficult.
SevenSigs 5y ago
Haven't tried it but there is an addon to automatically enable reader mode:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-v...
- frenkel 5y ago
  That's super useful for some known bad sites that I use. Thanks!

882 points by frenkel 5y ago

It’s good for night time reading too (i.e. it obeys dark mode), it’s a shame hacker news doesn’t seem to work with Safari’s reader mode though I guess it’s designed for article pages!

hhsbz 5y ago

I never use it because I know the process is automatic and I'm always afraid I will be missing part of the text or the pictures. I've found ad blockers to be more or less competent in removing the stupid European banners, but they are far from flawless. Some sites get stuck without a scroll bar for example

frenkel 5y ago
You should give it a try, I've never noticed any important parts missing.
- kzrdude 5y ago
  Sometimes images are missing. Especially banner images, of course, and sometimes those illustrate the story, but I think also background-level images (that are used for non-background purposes, if you miss them, of course).
- q-rews 5y ago
  I use Safari’s reader mode on Medium and it fails to load lazy-loaded images (unsurprisingly) so if I want to see those, I have to scroll down first and then enable the mode.
perryizgr8 5y ago
This is exactly why I don't use it either. Sometimes I have noticed that diagrams/images are stripped out. Sometimes a couple paragraphs at the end will be omitted.
- sidpatil 5y ago
  I've noticed the same thing. Nowadays I quickly check the end of the article before switching to reader mode, to make sure it's still there.
hlasdjlfhalwjk 5y ago
> I'm always afraid I will be missing part of the text or the pictures As for missing pictures, my argument is, either the text is referring to an image that cannot be seen in reader mode, then I'll notice and switch back to normal mode to see the image, or the image is not relevant to the text, so I just don't care for it.
aerojoe23 5y ago
I use it for the text to speech in Firefox a lot. When there isn't a pay wall in the way I'll open the page in another tab while reader read's it to me. This way I can see the text and pictures the way they intended it to be. Another downside is that text content for other articles on the site that aren't part of the article, will be in the content. On the full site they'll be links or something and you just skip them with out thinking. In text to speech reader mode, it reads them off.
dredmorbius 5y ago
There's no risk in invoking Reader Mode. If it doesn't render or omits text, you can simply toggle it off / navigate back to the native page. Images in online articles are irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the time --- 75%--95% or more. At best they're eye-candy or distractions. They occasionally provide context. Some serve as a contextual reminder. I'd suggest that information-critical graphics (there's information in the image that's not available from the article itself) are in the neighbourhood of 1% of all images. These tend to be graphs, plots, charts, or maps. They're also generally rendered by Reader Mode, unless the site is very poorly designed. TL;DR: This is an irrelevant concern.

627467 5y ago

Underused? I wish I could set the browser to be always in reader mode so I can save taps every day. Reader mode along with private mode is great paywall circumventer. In opera mobile you can save reader mode pages in mhtml, it's great alternative to webarchive

severine 5y ago
SevenSigns posted an addon to do that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287190 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287190 and there's an alternative here https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/automatic-reader... I don't use the automatic addons, but one that lets me right click and open directly in reader view, works a treat! https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/reader-view https://addons.mozilla.org/en/firefox/addon/reader-view Try them out!

Forge36 5y ago

The flag doesn't exist on mobile. There is another, but i didn't see it do anything. chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics Accessibly has a "show simplified view" which seems comparable

kzrdude 5y ago
Firefox for Android has reader mode.
- x-sp 5y ago
  As does Opera
  - neop1x 5y ago
    and Brave (after enabling it in Settings)
- throwthroyaboat 5y ago
  I remember it being a button in the URL bar, but now it's gone?

dijit 5y ago

I think I have to share my incredulation; I always use Reader Mode on Safari iOS: lots of sites are quite literally unreadable otherwise.

FabHK 5y ago
And, in both macOS and iOS Safari, you have a per-website-setting to request reader view automatically. It's great.
opdahl 5y ago
Quick tip on Safari iOS Reader View: Click and hold the 'aA' button on the address bar and it will go straight to reader view without you having to go through the menu and selecting it.
- interpol_p 5y ago
  And if you tap "Website Settings" from the 'aA' popup (this is iOS 15, not sure where the setting lives in iOS 14, but it's somewhere there too), you can toggle "Use Reader Automatically" for the domain
fckthisguy 5y ago
I exclusively use reader mode on Firefox when reading news articles. So many site are borderline unusable otherwise due to all the ads, popups, cookie policies, and subscription promps.
- LegitShady 5y ago
  …I just use adblockers.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    This isn't as effective as it was in the past now that anti-adblocking is practically universal.

eurasiantiger 5y ago

Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box.

eganist 5y ago
> Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box. Refresh while in reader mode. The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render, not before it reaches the web browser. Refreshing in reader mode prevents client side scripts from executing and rewriting the DOM. I'm presuming this is to be search engine friendly, but I'll leave it to the SEO experts to educate me. This is what I do with most sites.
- OJFord 5y ago
  Disabling JS also often works for the same reason. (But reader mode is great, nothing against it.)
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  With iOS, for example, refreshing npr.org just turns off reader mode.
  - nojito 5y ago
    As you refresh it should change the address bar saying reader mode avaiable and you should be able to quickly hit the Aa icon on the top left.
    - eurasiantiger 5y ago
      They redirect to another subdomain, so I don’t think this will work. Thanks anyway!
- subscribeNOW 5y ago
  > The DOM with most paywalls is destroyed post-render This has changed for most major sites. Users behind the paywall are served a "truncated" version of the article that never included a full version of it. The days of "press Esc before it finishes loading!" are coming to an end it seems. The truncated version is still more SEO-friendly than a blank page as it has the headline and partial content.

aerojoe23 5y ago

I love reader mode in Firefox. It will also do text to speech for you. The voices seem to dependent on something built into the OS. They sound okay on windows and I haven't figured out how to get them to sound good on linux. On windows the voices sound good, but I Wish I could get it to go a little faster. The voices don't sound human so it takes some getting used to. On linux the voices just sound more harsh. To the point I don't want to use it. If anyone knows a switch to flip or how to install additional voices to make them sound better, that would be great.

busymom0 5y ago
For anyone interested, my hacker news app HACK does both reader node as well as read text to speech. It's brand new so any feedback is welcome: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.hack https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pranapps.h... It's available on iOS too which uses the built in reader mode of safari.
- AlexAndScripts 5y ago
  Just tried it out. I usually use Harmonic, and in general I much prefer the UI - it's more minimalistic, lower contrast, and I prefer the font (Product Sans). It also has a built in ad blocker. However, I appreciate the various filtering options / different feeds and the archive access seems like a really useful feature. On the whole I think I'll stick with Harmonic, but it looks like it has some potential.
  - busymom0 5y ago
    The settings in my app can be customized to make it as minimalist as needed (like hide favicons, hide the metadata, only show titles etc). There’s also settings for color choices and a setting to use lower contrast text. Font sizes and paragraph spacing can be changed to make it more compact. My app has a built in adblocker too for the built in browser. My app has reply push notifications too which I don’t think any of the other HN apps have. As for the font, Product Sans is not legally allowed to be used by third parties as far as I am aware: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can-i-use-the-font-product-sans-for-a-commercial-poster/115783#115783 https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can... My app allows you to change fonts too and it supports Montserrat font which looks visually similar to Product Sans.

vanderZwan 5y ago

This doesn't even mention one of my favorite features of Firefox Android: if you bookmark a site in reader mode it gets saved as an off-line version

severine 5y ago
Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, that feature is deprecated in newer versions.
- vanderZwan 5y ago
  Aaargh, it really feels like they're actively making their product worse lately

neebz 5y ago

In Safari you can set reader mode turned on for specified websites. I have done it for all the sites which I visit frequently. Unfortunately there is no way to to turn it on at global level. The only minor gripe I have is the slide-above animation when reader mode turns on. It's jarring when you keep getting that on each navigation.

Jakob 5y ago
You can turn it on globally by selecting: Preferences > Websites > Reader > When visiting other websites: On

fergie 5y ago

I always assumed that Reader Mode was used pretty heavily.

w0m 5y ago
i have read a total of 5 articles with it since introduction decade(s?) ago. The switch is just jarring
- dev_tty01 5y ago
  You mean the switch away from useless eye candy, advertising, link farms, popups, slide down flaps, useless multi-page clicks, cookie consent popups and banners, ...? Yes, it is jarring, but in a good way. To each their own I guess.

beervirus 5y ago

I use reader mode all the time on Firefox at home or on Safari on my phone. I’m forced to use Chrome at work though, and I always thought it didn’t have this feature. Good to see it can be enabled.

thrower123 5y ago

The only time I ever use reader mode is when the iOS Twitter app automatically launches Safari in that mode for links that I open. Sometimes it's helpful, more often the website is hopelessly broken and I have to try disabling it and going back to normal mode a few times - it seems to toggle back to reader mode about half the time when I disable it. Or I give up and copy the url and open it in Brave instead.

robinoh 5y ago

reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r

inanutshellus 5y ago
TIL!
noman-land 5y ago
You are a god.
perilunar 5y ago
command-alt-r on Mac/FF command-shift-r on Mac/Safari
arepublicadoceu 5y ago
> reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r F9 on Windows I use it all the time.

Saint_Genet 5y ago

You also get around many paywalls by activating reader mode.

lastgeniusua 5y ago

Sadly Tridactyl (vim keybindings for Firefox) doesn't work in reader mode, which really breaks the flow of my usual scrolling/tab-switching with vim keys. This, and the pdf reader tabs kill me because of it

bovine3dom 5y ago
How much do you care? There's an open pull request you could give a little time to that would fix it by integrating a reader mode into Tridactyl here: https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/pull/3306 https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/pull/3306 : )
- lastgeniusua 5y ago
  don't really have much experience with JS or TS, but might try this later, thanks!
  - bovine3dom 5y ago
    If you're familiar with CSS, writing a decent stylesheet for it would be a big help. If you've no interest in JS/TS you could leave that part to me.

CrlNvl 5y ago

On FF, is there an extension that automatically turns on reader mode when you are reading an article?

gizdan 5y ago
Yes. I've been using Automatic Reader View[0]. Though, to be honest, this should be an option directly in Firefox. [0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
forevercrashing 5y ago
Here’s another one: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-v...

rock_artist 5y ago

The title is maybe a little misleading? TL;DR - you can overcome so frustrating cookie permission popups and some invasive visual elements by using reader mode. However if we focus on the title, Reader Mode is a great feature (and I’m pretty sure many others followed by this title agree with that observation). I use it mostly on my mobile devices and it can greatly improve readability of something by controlling the text-formatting. Having said that, still many times (at least for me) it can resolve wrong translation for the content due to: * ignoring some divs in the page * in-ability to move to next pages (eg. hyperlinks) * bad RTL support I wish I would be able to use it more often. :)

jraph 5y ago

I use it from time to time but I would probably use it more often if reader mode was automatically restored on websites where I used it a first time (and didn't switch back). If the page is "good enough" when blocking ads (and I also have JS disabled by default), I won't bother using reader mode.

binkHN 5y ago

I might be the minority here, but this is why I use Edge on Windows. It's, basically, Chrome with a reader mode.

EMM_386 5y ago
Chrome apparently has a flag for this under chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode I tried flag in Brave ("brave://") but it is not working. Works great in Firefox.
- asicsp 5y ago
  >Chrome apparently has a flag And even then the options were confusing: 'Enabled' and 'Enabled available in settings' I first tried with Enabled, didn't work. Then tried the settings option, which showed reader mode option under 'Appearance'. After turning on this setting, the icon shows up.
- binkHN 5y ago
  I know this has been an on and off thing with Chrome, but, yes, it does appear to be back and works now.
- thenanyu 5y ago
  works now in brave, the setting is extremely confusing, you have to set it to "enabled and available in settings"

specproc 5y ago

Also a neat way to scrape some sites, big love for readability.

tyingq 5y ago

Just tried it on chrome mobile. The only way to make it always there is to change the triggering mode to always. Which means an annoying popup at the bottom. And the output of it is usually not helpful. Only works on (some) things that look like an article. Otherwise, it's truncated content.

mvanbaak 5y ago

It's the only way to visit sites like medium.com ;P

Narishma 5y ago

I use it daily to deal with the epidemic of hard to read too low-contrast websites, which this article is ironically guilty of.

ldenoue 5y ago

Agreed 100%. Because in Safari it doesn’t work on all websites, I made ReaderView, an app that does and also saves articles for later plus lets you highlight passages. Give it a try https://www.appblit.com/readerview https://www.appblit.com/readerview

bvm 5y ago

I really love the reading the codebases for these, the original Arc90 Readability bookmarklet was really quite...readable when unminified.

janandonly 5y ago
I still use that JS script to make a pdf with all links written out fully at the bottom <lovely> Also, I usually use Printfriendly.com to turn this page into a small pdf for saving. That is if it's worth saving, of course.

pmontra 5y ago

A useful feature of Firefox reader mode on Android is that if you bookmark a page from inside reader mode, Firefox saves it locally and you can go back to it from the bookmarks even when you are offline. I used it to read long web pages (usually fiction) on planes or in the middle of nowhere. Edit: it works only on older Firefox versions. This feature was removed sometime in the last months.

alkyon 5y ago
Interesting, but doesn't seem to work for me.
- pmontra 5y ago
  You're right. I checked with the new Firefox (the one with the "too many taps" GUI from one year ago) and it doesn't work anymore. I'm using the old Firefox on my main phone and it explicitly says "Saved offline" when I bookmark a Reader Mode page. The new Firefox on the backup phone says "Bookmark saved". One more reason to stay on the old Firefox.
  - _1a 5y ago
    This was one of the features I was actually sad to see go when I updated Firefox. I used this feature a lot as it was mainly manuals that I was saving. They also replaced the default start page to be Collections instead of bookmarks, which b of course for me was empty. I think I've got used to the new layout that I probably won't downgrade just for the offline capabilities.
  - morsch 5y ago
    Yup, it didn't make the transition to Fenix. That was such a cool feature. Maybe I should downgrade.
spupy 5y ago
That sounds almost exactly like the functionality that Firefox' Pocket provides. The app downloads a reader view of everything you put in there so you can read offline.

shandor 5y ago

My most wanted feature for Firefox right now is the ability to right-click (or long-press on mobile) the link and choose "Open Link in Reader mode" exactly like they already offer for "open Link in New Private window". I think that would be even more important than the Private shortcut, with the amount of unnecessary crap the websites try to cram on your screen.

classichasclass 5y ago
I implemented this for TenFourFox and it's a real godsend for certain sites. Meanwhile, there's this, but not Android-compatible: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader-view/
- shandor 5y ago
  Thanks for the addon! Just for the sake of curiosity, what do you think it would take for your addon to be ported to work also on Android?
  - CodesInChaos 5y ago
    Afaik firefox mobile only allows a small number of whitelisted extensions.
    - nick__m 5y ago
      there is a way¹ to install other addon (if you use firefox nightly) but it is downright user-hostile. 1- https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-add-on-in-firefox-nightly-for-android-but-it-is-complicated/ https://www.ghacks.net/2020/10/01/you-can-now-install-any-ad...
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    Not mine, so I haven't looked at it closely. In general, however, I think there are many more addons that could work, and should work on Android.

midjji 5y ago

Nice

jonplackett 5y ago

Does no one else user reader mode? I’ve found it the only way to stay sane on sites where ad blockers don’t work.

oefnak 5y ago
Which adblocker do you use? With ublock origin I almost never encounter sites where ads are visible.
- jonplackett 5y ago
  Only happens on mobile sometimes, and when a site forces you to turn it off to function. I'm on ublock too any other time! I feel a deep sense of pity for anyone still surfing the web unprotected!

AdmiralAsshat 5y ago

> I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default. What? The browser made by the company that derives 90% of its revenue from ads doesn't want to show you a button that can remove the ads? I am shocked!

abrowne 5y ago

Personally, I found reader mode missed just enough — like images loaded with js or footnotes referenced in an article — that it was more trouble than it was worth. And as much as I liked the "readability", I missed missed seeing the different designs, fonts and so on. (Who would want to read all books with exactly the same layout and typeface‽) Now I have a collection of user stylesheets I use with Stylus to improve sites I read a lot. I especially often remove fixed toolbars and adjust font size and line height. I also use the browser zoom feature a lot to get one-off sites to a better reading text size.

visarga 5y ago
Not just footnotes but also comments. I never saw a reader mode app that handles comments. I would use it to switch on TTS and have the comments read aloud, this increases my focus. Well, actually I have my own hand-made reader mode that works with comments as well, implemented as a bookmarklet about 10 years ago. But other tools can't handle reddit and hacker news for reading aloud.

ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

I use it often. Lots of sites have become wise to its use for bypassing paywalls, but it does work, occasionally, to get past a required sign-in. It's good for downloading sites as PDF.

GrumpyNl 5y ago

The icon doesnt show on chrome latest version.

frenkel 5y ago
Did you enable it in the settings?

tangoalpha 5y ago

I have been using reader-mode on Firefox and Chrome for long. Not just for better readability, but also most content behind paywalls is accessible with readermode. (May be because, most of the paywalls on news websites load all initial content, and then either truncate the content or hide the content using javascript, and hitting the paywall renders the page again without a lot of the CSS and JS that is used for hiding the content behind the paywall). Hopefully, this content doesn't have those paywall service providers to start working around reader modes.

k1m 5y ago

Any developers who'd like to contribute to improving how article content is extracted from web pages should check out Mozilla's Readability repository: https://github.com/mozilla/readability https://github.com/mozilla/readability I'm currently trying to bring the PHP port up to speed here: https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php We use an older version as part of our article extraction for Push to Kindle: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/ https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/

infogulch 5y ago
ArchiveBox is a tool that downloads web pages and saves them in various different formats: warc, pdf, rendered png, plain text. I wonder what it uses for plain text extraction and if the readability repo would be useful for that purpose. Edit: Oh neat it does actually. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#save_readability https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#... > Archive method SAVE_READABILITY > Extract article text, summary, and byline using Mozilla's Readability library. Unlike the other methods, this does not download any additional files, so it's practically free from a disk usage perspective. It works by using any existing downloaded HTML version (e.g. wget, DOM dump, singlefile) and piping it into readability.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  That's pretty amazing it already does it. ArchiveBox and the other stuff from the "DIY no-credentials don't-care-about-the-rules" web archiving community, like ArchiveTeam.... continues to astound me with it's quality and "professionalism" (as a credentialed professional in the field of digital library stuff... they are often outdoing the actual credentialed professional community).
  - nikisweeting 5y ago
    Aww thank you!
up6w6 5y ago
I believe the Instant View[1] crowdsourcing model where people write templates for each website could boost a lot these parsers (hope they open source it soon). Its just impossible to make these extensions work for every single website with some simple heuristics. Check the codebase of some popular parsers: Firefox (already mentioned): https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readability.js https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readabili... Google Chrome: https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller Mercury parser: https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser [1] https://instantview.telegram.org/ https://instantview.telegram.org/

emaro 5y ago

I love the reader modes accross the different browsers. Especially Safary Mobile does a really good job, i.e. even expands the partitioned articles from golem.de into one single page. What slightly but consistently bothers me, is that the reader view in Firefox has very little customization options and (in my eyes) doesn't look very appealing. They should let a designer improve the stylesheet. You also cannot force the reader mode like in Pocket. I also want to mention the instant view feature of Telegram [0]. It can be used as a reader view as well. [0] https://instantview.telegram.org/ https://instantview.telegram.org/

clipradiowallet 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of reader mode! On a few sites that the adblocker can't work on - or sites that won't work because of the adblocker...reader mode is usually the only way for me to see the content. Example, wall street journal and some other mainstream news sites will obscure the article with a paywall, but reader mode shows it in entirety.

chrismorgan 5y ago

In Firefox this is implemented as about:reader?url=…, and you can use that URL to load reader mode even on pages that aren’t detected as compatible (so that the reader mode toolbar button doesn’t appear). This used be the URL on Firefox for Android as well, but if I recall correctly (I seldom use reader mode) it got changed in the Fenix world so that it’s a moz-extension:// URL.

classichasclass 5y ago
I used to enter about:reader URLs all the time for pages that Firefox Android wouldn't show the button for. Do you know where the moz-extension:// incantation for this is? I would think it's a constant UUID, so maybe I just need to page through the source. There really should be an option for "always let me try Reader Mode."

refracture 5y ago

Reader mode on Firefox for iPad OS is wonderful, gets rid of everything but the text I want and it feels like reading an eBook.

kjr247 5y ago

Doesn't work on Chromium Brave. /tries not to cry /lays on the floor and cries alot

dusted 5y ago

I love reader mode, but I can't for the life of me get it to work everywhere on my site, and there's no way to hint to the browser that I want to support it, or supply additional helpful metadata.

jeromenerf 5y ago

Dammit, don’t tell everyone, they will notice it.

blunte 5y ago

I use it on my phone all the time. It almost makes phone browsing tolerable. It's great for getting rid of Medium crap and other FUBAR sites. Plus it typically makes the text larger, so I can read it without glasses.

lowercased 5y ago
same here - it will default to a good size font and high contrast dark mode. i've found myself using it... a lot over the last few months. i picked up a new 12 mini, and as I was developing new habits, this became one of them. if something is more than one screen of text, i reach for reader mode.

classichasclass 5y ago

Reader View is excellent on low-spec systems. On TenFourFox you can try any page in Reader View, not just what the browser thinks will work. I also implemented sticky reader view, where going to links stays in reader mode even on different sites until you explicitly leave reader view (see https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/09/tenfourfox-fpr27b1-available-now-with.html https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2020/09/tenfourfox-fpr27b1-a... ) and auto reader view by domain or by domain subpages ( https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2021/03/tenfourfox-fpr31b1-available-now-with.html https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2021/03/tenfourfox-fpr31b1-a... ). Combined with a right-click to Open in Reader View menu option, this means you can jump right in and spend less time waiting for pages to load on older computers.

freediver 5y ago
"Sticky Reader View" is an excellent idea! Perhaps there is no need for both sticky and auto reader view settings. As soon as the user enabled auto reader view, you assume Sticky mode and enable auto reader view on any domains they subsequently visit (and render in reader mode successfully at least once?)
- classichasclass 5y ago
  TenFourFox uses sticky mode by default anyway. But you make a good point for others who might implement such a feature.

everdrive 5y ago

I use this all the time and it's wonderful! It's not underused here. A LOT of the time a webpage will be completely broken / filled with ads / javascript / and other useless garbage. One click and I'm in reader mode, and all that junk is gone and I just have nice clean text, and perhaps a couple of images. Makes me wonder if I can set reader mode automatically for certain pages.

krylon 5y ago
There used to be an extension for Firefox called "Open in reader mode" that adds an item to the context menu for links to... well, open them in reader mode. It's not quite what you want, but I found it to be very helpful. I haven't used it in a couple of years, though, so I do not know if it is still around/maintained.

stiltzkin 5y ago

Highly recommend Instant View on Telegram: https://instantview.telegram.org/ https://instantview.telegram.org/ You can make your site and pages compatible with Instant View, also there are bots which can export pages to Telegra.ph which are also Instant View compatible.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

inetknght 5y ago

I used reader mode for a long time and liked it but stopped using it because it still let javascript run.

pre 5y ago

I press it as soon as I see a popup about cookies or login or sales or basically anything at all. I press it when there's a paywall. I press it when the site doesn't do dark-mode. I press it when adverts become annoying. There also exists an auto-reader-mode plugin that you can tell to always open that site in reader-mode in future. Reader mode is great. Hope it doesn't become popular so website start trying to stop it working.

zelphirkalt 5y ago

I use it on a daily basis. Without it a lot of websites are unusable for me. I just want to read the content, I do not wish to see the ads or interactive whatever. I want content. It is especially helpful, when websites manage to become unreadable without loading JS, because somehow they screwed up their CSS so badly, or it does not exist, without loading JS. Reader mode basically saves those websites from becoming instantly closed tabs.

Kim_Bruning 5y ago
I recently started using this too. Now why can't websites just be written to work this way in the first place?

black3r 5y ago

I use this all the time on mobile just to bypass pop-ups, videos and other annoyances I don't want to see when reading articles.

nayuki 5y ago

Firefox's reader mode can bypass paywalls on many news sites (e.g. The Economist). It's simple to activate; press F9 and then F5.

rodolphoarruda 5y ago

I'm an absolute heavy user of reader mode in Firefox, not only for reading content per se, but to clean up content before I copy/paste it into Evernote. I just love the feature.

ryanianian 5y ago
I find Evernote's web clipper (browser extension) to usually do a job either comparable to or better than Firefox's web clipper. Clipper > Clip Format > Article. It used to be pretty bad but they've made it a lot better in the past few months. It also has the benefit of storing the source url in the note and creating the new note from scratch which you don't get by copy/pasting into a new note.

markus_zhang 5y ago

I always choose reader mode on mobile if applicable. I'm wondering why some websites don't have reader mode.

npteljes 5y ago
It's based on the browser detecting whether Reader Mode is applicable for the content. If it's neatly organized into headers, paragraphs, etc, then it will be available. If it's unorganized on a technical level, the browser might not pick it up correctly.
- markus_zhang 5y ago
  Thanks that's probably the case!

DangitBobby 5y ago

> When available for a website, it is displayed as an icon at the end of the url bar in Firefox This is the only problem. When I really want it, it's often not available. archive.is is pretty bad on mobile because they are archiving desktop pages. Reader mode is not available there.

egypturnash 5y ago

Honestly now that I think about it it's kind of surprising that Chrome has a reader mode button at all; why would a company whose business is mostly "serving ads" want to make it easier for you to get rid of them?

HeckFeck 5y ago
Sssh, a Chrome PM might be reading!
- fsflover 5y ago
  So more people will switch to Firefox, good!
  - otterley 5y ago
    Whose primary funding comes from Google.

sysadm1n 5y ago

How does a browser's reader mode carve out the bit you want to read and ignore menus and other cruft? Does it scan for semantic elements like `<main> / <article>` or something and then serve up the 'meat' of the article?

js2 5y ago
More or less. Here's various implementations: https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability Original JS library: https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js/readability.js https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js... Specifically see here: https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js/readability.js#L704 https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...

mastrsushi 5y ago

I use reader mode anytime I come across an informative webpage. That being said, I always use it as the precious feature it is, presuming it will be removed either over lack of use and support or effect on ad market.

bambax 5y ago

> The same is true for Chrome, but you first need to enable it at chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode Oh... I didn't know that! I mosty use FF and reader mode is a big reason why. Reader mode is so much better for reading text... Also on mobile. The only weird behavior (on FF) is that it's a step forward in history; whey you press "back" you don't go back to the previous page, but to the current page in normal mode (with zero info in the url bar or anywhere else (that I could find)).

corentin88 5y ago

I’m a huge fan of the reader mode on Safari for iOS. Probably the feature that I’m using the most, right after password autocompletion.

BeetleB 5y ago

Reader mode really helps me in printing as well. Old comment of mine: Printing is something I started to do some months ago. Instead of keeping the tab open for weeks, I decided I'd print anything I want to read and place it a physical "inbox". Some tips: I print 2 pages to a side, so 4 pages per printer paper. Even long articles don't use too much paper, and for my eyes it's still readable (there are a few articles where I need to enlarge first). I print using either Firefox's "Simplify Page" feature or its "Readability" feature. This removes almost all the noise: No ads, no menus, etc. It's just the article and relevant images. Similar to reading a physical newspaper. It's been a game changer. I can now read wherever I want. Going to the mechanic? I just take some of these printed articles with me. I find myself taking notes on the paper - something I would not do well on the computer screen. My eyes get a lot less strain. Once you get used to this, there's no going back. Now when I see an article through a web browser, it's just ugly. Too many distractions. Even the menus are annoying. I didn't realize I'd been putting up with filth for so long. I initially worried that my inbox would get full and I'd have the same mental angst, and my plan was that if it happens, I'll take a random bunch and throw it in the recycle bin. But it never came to that - I still manage to read everything I print. Somehow, the physical inbox weighs less on my mind than the virtual one. I don't feel I need to deal with this inbox. It's OK if it just sits there collecting dust. Bad for the environment. Good for the brain.

ratioprosperous 5y ago
Doing exactly this with a large format e-ink tablet has been revolutionary for me
- eagleislandsong 5y ago
  Which e-ink tablet would you recommend?
  - mariusor 5y ago
    Kobo devices have out of the box integration with Pocket, which Mozilla supports natively.

matthewfelgate 5y ago

I discovered Reader Mode on Chrome a few months ago and have used it a lot since. I use it everyday and it makes it much easier to read articles.

soheil 5y ago

I use Reading List feature to save articles that I want to listen to later during a run or workout. I made https://per.quest https://per.quest to listen to any URL. I wish there was a rss feed provided by the browser for Reading List feature so I could listen to articles one after another. I also stopped using reader mode for sites with insane ads/videos/js/popovers that hog the browser and just open them with per.quest/read/[URL] to extract just the article text.

timwis 5y ago

I always worry about missing bits like code samples in iframes when switching to reader mode :/

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aimor 5y ago

Firefox USED to allow accessing reader mode by prepending the url with 'about:reader?url='. This doesn't work anymore and I don't know what to use instead. There is a reader mode button that toggles it on and off, but some websites redirect or change the content before I can click the button. Sometimes the button just doesn't appear (why not, reader mode usually works fine). Refreshing the page sometimes works, if the website doesn't redirect or change the address. Is there some other way to force reader mode before the page load?

Arnavion 5y ago
>Firefox USED to allow accessing reader mode by prepending the url with 'about:reader?url='. This doesn't work anymore and I don't know what to use instead. Prepending `about:reader?url=` works for me, but only for pages that Firefox shows the button on anyway. For pages where it doesn't show a button, prepending `about:reader?url=` says "Failed to load article from page", which is to be expected because... >Sometimes the button just doesn't appear (why not, reader mode usually works fine). ... the Reader Mode script uses heuristics to identify if the document has an article. So it can't work on a document where it can't find an article to extract.
- aimor 5y ago
  That's interesting, maybe this is the results of a change regarding when the button is shown, or simply in how reader mode works? Previously we have had success in forcing reader mode when the option is not available. See, for example: https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-enable-reader-view-in-mozilla-firefox/ https://www.howtogeek.com/268116/is-there-a-way-to-force-ena...

Lio 5y ago

Best thing for me about Reader mode is banishing annoying scrollback menu flaps. Nothing worse than trying to position a long form text article and a pointless menu flap popping up to obscure the text. So you then have to perform another round of up/down to get the page in the right place. It's not even as if modern browsers, either desktop or mobile, don't give you a way to quickly jump to the top of the page where you can see the menu.

larodi 5y ago

one little known feature of reader mode, no matter if firefox's or safari/mobile is that more often than you would expect, it kind of magically goes through pay-walls. so you get to see articles that require subscription or payment or else, with a single click. this happens so often that makes one wonder whether is due to some devs being lazy (hiding the actual content) or is by intent kept for savvy readers. also does great job getting through nasty full-screen cookie consent banners. basically is a glitter of hope for the web as a whole. btw, was thinking about article like this one for some weeks now. great minds think alike, right :)

subscribeNOW 5y ago
> whether is due to some devs being lazy or is by intent kept for savvy readers Neither, the business value isn't there, not enough people use Reader Mode to warrant spending the dev time to close the hole. It's coming soon though, and I'm building it. Sorry!
GrinningFool 5y ago
The less we talk about great things like reader mode, the longer it will be before it's broken by default on the websites that need it most.
mcswell 5y ago
I'm using Vivaldi, which is like Chrome but with a far better UI. It has a reader mode, which afaict does not help with the paywall at The Economist. Perhaps it's because if you pay for a subscription there, the full article is at a second link?

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underdeserver 5y ago

I read this post on reader mode.

vermaden 5y ago

Today's web is unusable without these two: - uBlock Origin - I Do Not Care About Cookies The latter can also be configured for uBlock: https://majkiit.github.io/polish-ads-filter/#i_dont_care_about_cookies https://majkiit.github.io/polish-ads-filter/#i_dont_care_abo...

Meph504 5y ago

I use it all the time to avoid a lot of modal popup article blockers and the like.

sprkwd 5y ago

Not in my house it's not. A lot of sites are practically unreadable without reader mode these days.

ZachSaucier 5y ago

Shameless plug: I maintain a cross-browser reader extension that is like reader mode with some additional features. It's called Just Read: https://justread.link/ https://justread.link/

freediver 5y ago
Looks great! What does this use underneath? How is it different than Readability.js in terms of parsing output?
- ZachSaucier 5y ago
  It uses a pretty simple text selection algorithm I've developed through trial and error: https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Just-Read/blob/6dcb4f05b93287b0ec64744604a875967246b1e0/content_script.js#L670 https://github.com/ZachSaucier/Just-Read/blob/6dcb4f05b93287... I don't know how it compares to Readability.js.
  - freediver 5y ago
    Hey that works pretty well for such a simple implementation! Good job!

beyondcompute 5y ago

Reader mode in mobile Safari is basically one of the two things that keep me on iOS (the other one is dictation).

Razengan 5y ago

While we’re on this subject, why the hell is HN so hostile to readability? No dark mode, minuscule font, easy to mistap the tiny “buttons”, and no support for Reader Mode

dredmorbius 5y ago
HN is managed very conservatively from a UI/UX perspective. I share several of your concerns. You can contact the mods directly at hn@ycombinator.com One suggestion that is apparently in the pipeline is for a user-provided custom CSS which could be used to fix font, contrast, and other aspects. The underlying structure of HN pages (nightmare table-based layout) makes more substantial revisions difficult. There are numerous alternative-interface projects using the HN API as well.

hollerith 5y ago

The main reason reader mode is "underused" is that for a substantial fraction of pages, it does not work. Because of the way the human motivational architecture works, if there were a reader mode that always worked, its rate of usage would be many times higher than the usage rates of the current crop of reader modes. But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact is one of the main arguments for competing with the web rather than trying to improve or fix the web. By "competing with the web", I mean creating online services that take the attention of users away from the web for some subset of things the web is used for, e.g., consuming static textual content, also known as reading. Gemini would be an example of an attempt to compete with the web, and it has the property that every page is essentially automatically in reader mode. The trick is to find some desire that the web is currently bad at satisfying, then improving Gemini to cater to that desire. For example, TOR was created (many years ago) by the US military to give its employees a way to browse the web without revealing their browsing history to the spy agencies of the US's enemies. But maybe Gemini's much greater simplicity would enable it to make a stronger guarantee of user privacy than the web is able to guarantee. (The more complicated a web browser gets, the harder it becomes to make privacy or security guarantees -- particularly guarantees of interest to only a small fraction of the web's users.) If that were the case, then whoever needs that stronger guarantee would tend to become avid users and proponents of Gemini. Getting very small numbers of avid users is considered an effective way to start increasing the number of users of a new online service. The idea I just described is probably a bad idea: there are probably other desires that Gemini or some other non-web service could cater to that are much more effective ways of creating avid users of that non-web service. (For example, the idea I just described has the disadvantage that even if the proposed improved version of Gemini could make stronger privacy guarantees than the web can (which seems unlikely to me) good luck convincing the average user who is not a security professional of that fact.) Finding them is hard! But trying to find one is a more potent way to try to improve things IMO than trying to fix or improve the web is.

kixiQu 5y ago
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi > Gemini is not intended to replace either Gopher or the web, but to co-exist peacefully alongside them as one more option which people can freely choose to use if it suits them. In the same way that some people currently serve the same content via gopher and the web, people will be able to "bihost" or "trihost" content on whichever combination of protocols they think offer the best match to their technical, philosophical and aesthetic requirements and those of their intended audience.

agumonkey 5y ago

On i remember how often I used printfriendly just for that. Also I find the irony of reader mode quite funny. Lets build the most dynamic and capable presentation system so we can go relive bbs

tomiplaz 5y ago

My favourite and often used browser feature (Firefox).

kixiQu 5y ago

I gotta go back and figure out if I can submit a PR to fix footnotes, though [1]. I don't like using Reader Mode when I know there might be stuff missing, so I itch to go and check. [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/654 https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/654

robotburrito 5y ago

Reader mode is awesome and it makes a lot of the web actually usable.

jrochkind1 5y ago

I had no idea this was an option in Chrome, you just had to turn on a flag to enable it! I am interested... also interested in if it gets past various paywall attempts.... Is there any way to get it on Android stock Chrome?

mperham 5y ago

My advice to bloggers: if your blog readability is improved by activating Reader mode, you have a styling bug to fix. Two universal improvements: 1. Bump up your font size. 2. Increase contrast.

nicbou 5y ago
3. Remove all the crap that isn't the article the user came for I don't use Reader mode for readability, but to remove all the clutter on the page.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  It's not absolutely necessary to remove it, but when reading the article it should not be front-and-centre on the page. That means: - Single-column layouts. Sidebars suck. - No fixed-position elements. Especially not headers or footers, though fixed sidebars are also almost always a mistake. (There can be some benefit for reference / tools, but only about one time in a thousand that they're actually used.) On desktop, I disable all of these with either CSS (Stylish) or uMatrix element blocker. I've given up on any nuance here. If it's a choice of fixed header/footer or none at all, it's none at all. - A static set of nav or informational links above or below the main article text is acceptable. It's present, but doesn't interfere with the reading flow. - Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already.
  - omaranto 5y ago
    > - Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already. You mean you want two scrollbars? One from the web page and one from the browser window. That seems like an odd choice.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Presently the fashion appears to be none. Worse: the scrollbars which do exist are indicator-only, they cannot be used to actually navigate on the page. On the four mobile devices I routinely have access to, none has an actual grabbable persistent scrollbar for navigation. https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511

jrochkind1 5y ago

The "first example"[1] now 404s. Weird. So can't actually see the demo the OP wanted to demo.... [1]: https://techdows.com/2015/02/enable-test-reader-mode-firefox-nightly.html https://techdows.com/2015/02/enable-test-reader-mode-firefox...

Raineer 5y ago
Well I'm sure it's seeing a lot more traffic than the website intended.

ximm 5y ago

> The web has been plagued by cookie consent popups and banners since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect. It has become obvious that no user would willingly consent to the overuse of cookies since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect. Here, I fixed that for you.

SubiculumCode 5y ago

I love reader mode and use it a lot, but my biggest complaint is that sites seem to be able to control when the option appears in the browser, or if not, it seems to only appear after the site has finished loading.

dredmorbius 5y ago

I'm a huge fan of Readability Mode and use it often. It's proof that Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem. For those who are using e-ink devices, or even just standard tablets, EInkBro is another immensely useful tool. Yes, it's a standalone browser, not a mode on Firefox, Safari, Vivalti, etc. https://github.com/plateaukao/browser https://github.com/plateaukao/browser (Available through Google Play, F-Droid and other sources. Android-only, sorry iOS fans.) What it offers over standard browsers is that it's optimised for e-ink displays. That is, it favours pagination over scrolling, runs to full-screen, can easily adjust font size up or down (no more itsy-bitsy-teen-weenie-yellow-polka-dot HN fonts), bold text, and has its own reader mode as well. Even on a standard tablet, some of these features are a huge step above and beyond the mainstream browsers. The feature-set is limited, some of the UI is a bit rough, and a few things are just plain broken (if you need to edit entries in the JS or Cookie enabled/disabled sites ... you have to delete all data and start over again). That said, my usage is evolving from sending individual pages to EInkBrow when I want to do long-form reading, to using it at least part-time as a primary browser. (Mozilla Fennec Fox is my first choice, still.) The browser is stable and very much usable despite this. The developer is responsive to requests and bug reports. What's most refreshing is that the design principle is readability of Web content, as determined by the user, and not by the page author or publisher.

jabroni_salad 5y ago
Thanks for linking that, I'm going to try it on my reader when I get home. I like my boox for most things I try to use it for, but right now the pain point is all the royalroad webnovels I'm addicted to.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  I have both Mozilla Pocket and EInkBro on the BOOX. My preference is to read in EInkBro. Pocket's craptastic pagination is endless frustration. (I still use Pocket to save/tag content. But for what's supposed to be an enhanced readability tool, it's increasingly insufficient.)
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puttycat 5y ago

My workflow in case of a long article I want to read on my Kindle without distractions: View in reader mode --> Save as PDF --> Send to Kindle email address --> Sync Kindle. I wish this could be automized.

jtth 5y ago
Instapaper has this, and can even be set up to send a weekly digest.

AlexCoventry 5y ago

Is there a keyboard shortcut for reader mode, in chrome?

thamer 5y ago
If you use macOS, it's also in the menu bar in the View menu. This means that you can define an app-specific keyboard shortcut in Preferences > Keyboards > Shortcuts > App Shortcuts. Then click [+] and select Chrome as the application, then type "Enter Reader Mode" (exactly like it appears in the menu, and without quotes) and choose a shortcut. I'd also recommend adding one for "Exit Reader Mode" since the option changes to this text once you are in reader mode. You can use the same shortcut, it's fine since the two options are never present at the same time. This works for pretty much all apps, by the way.
- AlexCoventry 5y ago
  Thanks. I'm on Ubuntu, though.

zzo38computer 5y ago

I would want to use my own styles or just the default HTML styles, as one (I don't want it to use big font sizes, narrow text, etc; I want to use my own settings please, and you can use your own settings please). But also, will wanting ARIA view, where the accessible tree is formatted (this would also allow forms, etc to work). However, the accessible tree seems to be missing some important information too, such as whether or not text is fixpitch, strong, emphasis, etc (as far as I can tell it is missing, anyways; trying a simple web page with different formatting and displaying the accessible tree seems to lose this information). Sometimes simply disabling CSS and JavaScripts fixes it a lot, and avoids a lot of annoyances. Some forms don't work if CSS is disabled, because they replace the widgets with their own (I really don't like this); the ARIA attributes are there though, which is supposed to allow it to display it properly even if the styles are disabled, but simply disabling CSS won't do that; it is necessary to parse the ARIA attributes too. But to do better might require both the accessible tree and the DOM tree.

stuartd 5y ago

You can set iOS Safari to default to reader mode for all websites in Safari/Website settings/Reader/All websites Then for sites you don’t want to use reader mode in, you turn ‘User reader automatically’ off in the site settings.

kazinator 5y ago

I started making more use of reader more upon discovering that it can get around paywalls in many cases.

yepthatsreality 5y ago

I wonder if low usage will lead it to eventually be removed (for example no one cares to maintain the feature code), much like the previous “reader mode” feature: RSS support. Will we say “that’s fine browsers should only focus on one thing”?

funnyThing7 5y ago

“I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default.” Damn right. You can bet you ass Google doesn’t want to actively push users away from bloated pages filled with ads.

obscuren 5y ago

I’ve always been puzzled by the “You accept these cookies” banners. Some have an ‘accept’ and ‘don’t accept/let me choose’ and some even come with a ‘X’ to close the banner. So what does it mean when I either click the ‘X’ or simply do nothing and leave the banner there while I read the article? What does it mean when I use reader mode and basically ignore the question whether I accept them or not?

epse 5y ago
You have not explicitly given your consent to tracking / cookies so there should be none

bogomipz 5y ago

Could someone explain how Reader Mode on iOS devices is able to bypass login walls for new sites?

acsigen 5y ago

An even cooler feature which the reader has in Edge for Windows is that it can read the articles aloud with a natural voice. Also useful to listen to PDFs

therealmarv 5y ago

Did not know that there is a reader mode in Chrome. It has only one bug: It does not work together with Google Translate :( I used in the past mainly Reader View because it does not need access/injection to all your web pages https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabifbgmdmgdllomnfinbmaellmclnh https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/reader-view/ecabif... another extension I used (which worked better sometimes) was a local copy/fork of Rocket Readability https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rocket-readability/fhckbdfnalikpmcmcpcpkkdlhabngbod?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rocket-readability... I forked it because I code reviewed it and it needs access to all your web sites. I don't want any surprise update happen with that extension. Seems I still need it for foreign articles+Google Translate.

spullara 5y ago

This is my most loved feature of Safari missing from Chrome by default. Edge has added it recently.

maddyboo 5y ago

I love reader mode but I don’t use it when reading technical content because it lacks syntax highlighting. I’ve also often encountered bugs where certain graphics that are core the the article won’t be shown and I will be confused until I turn off reader mode and see what I was missing. But for non-technical articles, it usually works fine.

Andrew_nenakhov 5y ago

What do you mean, 'underused'??? I can't live without it and use it for almost anything, where it works! Not works to read comments on HN, unfortunately. It also helps against most register-to-read popups, and against advertising-infested websites that fool all adblockers.

solarkraft 5y ago

Is there something like reader mode as a service (with TLS > 1.3 support)? It’d allow me to relatively comfortably read web articles on my Kindle Touch, which has a software stack that was already outdated when it came out a decade ago.

datavirtue 5y ago

On mobile it is under Settings,Accessibility, Simplified View.

Pasorrijer 5y ago

Fun fact! Reader mode also sidesteps some paywalls on news sites.

innagadadavida 5y ago

I have the same problem reading emails on my small screen phone. This in spite of the fact that emails contain a text representation of the message in addition to the formatted version. The default mail client on iPhones can be improved a lot but it doesn’t look like it’s getting any attention at all.

noobermin 5y ago

Underused? I use it for almost every article I open.

AYBABTME 5y ago

Firefox's reader mode is amazing, especially if you need to read long content; their text-to-speech tool works very well and I use Firefox in large part because of it. On Chrome, a startup named Speechify has a (crappy/intrusive) extension. They also have a decent iOS app, for ebooks, PDF and mobile web browsing... but their pricing structure is ridiculously expensive (also their annoying marketing feels like a giant ego trip/self promotional mania from the founder/CEO). However their voices are slightly better than the OS's.

fomine3 5y ago

IMO most underrated browser feature is "Create shortcut" on Chromium. It can make any website to app-style window and create shortcut, so it can be pinned to Windows taskbar. So it can virtually replace some Electron apps to just a window for web version, so we can save system resources used by each Electron Chromium instances. It's also useful that shares browser profile, and extensions like ad blocker and password manager. Sadly Firefox truncated similar feature. It's deal breaker for me. https://superuser.com/questions/468580/create-application-shortcut-chromes-feature-in-firefox https://superuser.com/questions/468580/create-application-sh... I wish more Chrome users use this to avoid the feature removed.

noisy_boy 5y ago
Agreed - this allows me to run WhatsApp on Linux (as much as I don't want to, everyone I need to interact with is using it) in a chromium window like an app.
mackrevinack 5y ago
i was using a think called ICE SSB with firefox 2 years ago but when i updated linux/pop os it stopped working. i think it was made by the crowd who make peppermint os anyway, as i was searching for that i came across this article. i just skimmed it but it seems like feature might be coming back? https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-firefox/ https://www.maketecheasier.com/enable-site-specific-browser-... i think the ICE SSB thing is better though. it lets you add a custom icon and you can search/launch them along with your other desktop apps

michaelcampbell 5y ago

I haven't used it a lot, but have started with the increase in posts here using the absurd "lite" CNN links. I use a wide monitor, and these full-width text only splats are really difficult.

SevenSigs 5y ago

Haven't tried it but there is an addon to automatically enable reader mode:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-view/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-reader-v...

frenkel 5y ago
That's super useful for some known bad sites that I use. Thanks!