[HN Gopher] The most underused browser feature: reader mode
___________________________________________________________________
The most underused browser feature: reader mode
Author : frenkel
Score : 690 points
Date : 2021-08-24 09:09 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (frankgroeneveld.nl)
(TXT) w3m dump (frankgroeneveld.nl)
| rock_artist wrote:
| 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. :)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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?
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| 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.
| jraph wrote:
| 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.
| Razengan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Unfortunately, as others have pointed out, that feature is
| deprecated in newer versions.
| vanderZwan wrote:
| Aaargh, it really feels like they're actively making their
| product worse lately
| tangoalpha wrote:
| 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.
| hollerith wrote:
| 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.
| spideymans wrote:
| >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.
|
| Web developers go out of their way to break Reader Mode. What
| incentive would they have to create content for a platform that
| competes with the web, which actively limits their ability to
| deliver ads and degrade the reading experience?
|
| In any case, I imagine that a ML powered Reader Mode engine
| would perform significantly better than a semantically powered
| engine. It should be fairly straightforward to train a ML model
| to make a visual distinction between the actual content, and
| the ads and other garbage that pollutes webpages. Crowdsourced
| training data would increase the accuracy even further, while
| limiting the ability of developers to defeat the reader mode.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Depending what you are making, different protocols can be good
| (Gemini may be good for some things, NNTP may be good for some
| things, IRC may be good for some things, etc).
|
| Gemini file format also could be usable independently of the
| protocol, although I do not know of any implementations.
|
| I think that sometimes you might want to use Gemini without TLS
| (it is good they have it, but I am not sure that requiring it
| is so good), so my proposal is to make the new URI scheme
| "insecure-gemini:" for this purpose. In this mode, client
| certificates won't work, so TLS will still be required if you
| want to use client certificates.
|
| Also, unfortunately curl is not implementing Gemini protocol;
| adding that might help to increase its usage too, since then
| you can at least download files from it easily. However, I have
| seen discussions and some of them are valid concerns. For
| example, I think -k should not be the default; doing it
| different for different protocols doesn't seem like good to me.
| You can still specify -k yourself if you want to do. Also the
| patch does not implement redirects, even if -L is specified; it
| ought to be fixed to allow -L to work. Allowing longer URLs
| might also help.
|
| Furthermore, a better web browser will need to be made,
| excluding half of the stuff and implementing the other half of
| the stuff differently, before adding some more.
| kixiQu wrote:
| 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.
| Lio wrote:
| 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.
| mperham wrote:
| 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.
| bityard wrote:
| Honestly, I see way more blogs with a font size 20% to 50%
| bigger than what I consider readable. Pro-tip: if the text is
| so huge that only like 10 words can fit on a line in a non-
| maximized browser window, your font size is way too big.
|
| It's like they are formatted for reading by teleprompter or
| something.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| And add margins!
| reaperducer wrote:
| A little line-height: 1.2em goes a long way, too.
| nicbou wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| FabHK wrote:
| > Especially not headers or footers
|
| What drives me insane: website with floating header and
| footer, and I read, then hit space to scroll down to the
| next "page", but it doesn't take into account what's hidden
| behind header and/or footer, so now I'm missing two lines,
| and have to grab mouse/arrow keys to scroll back up two
| lines. It just works and then you put in extra work to make
| it not work thank you very much arghhhhhh
| omaranto wrote:
| > - 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 wrote:
| 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511
| nicbou wrote:
| I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the layout on
| allaboutberlin.com. I built this website to be as pleasant
| as possible for the readers, but perhaps I've been staring
| at it for too long...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Pretty good, at a glance.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| I'm following a similar philosophy as the parent (kill
| fixed elements, disable CSS in extreme cases), and your
| web page manages to look stylish and readble at the same
| time.
|
| The fixed side bar on the "visiting" page is barely
| enough to fit on the display, and when I shrink the
| window (or increase the text enough), bottom items get
| cut off without recourse.
|
| The banners on most pages are so big that I usually see
| only 1 line of an article, which is mildly annoying.
|
| Note: disabling JS is a required part of making the web
| readable for me, and that's how I perfomed the review.
| UntitledNo4 wrote:
| Not the poster of the original comment, but I just
| visited your website (I live in Berlin), I found it very
| informative, pleasant and readable. Well done.
| binkHN wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| thenanyu wrote:
| works now in brave, the setting is extremely confusing, you
| have to set it to "enabled and available in settings"
| binkHN wrote:
| I know this has been an on and off thing with Chrome, but,
| yes, it does appear to be back and works now.
| neebz wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| You can turn it on globally by selecting:
|
| Preferences > Websites > Reader > When visiting other websites:
| On
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I always choose reader mode on mobile if applicable. I'm
| wondering why some websites don't have reader mode.
| npteljes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Thanks that's probably the case!
| hhsbz wrote:
| 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
| aerojoe23 wrote:
| 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.
| frenkel wrote:
| You should give it a try, I've never noticed any important
| parts missing.
| kzrdude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| specproc wrote:
| Also a neat way to scrape some sites, big love for readability.
| tyingq wrote:
| 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.
| sprkwd wrote:
| Not in my house it's not. A lot of sites are practically
| unreadable without reader mode these days.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| 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...
| Raineer wrote:
| Well I'm sure it's seeing a lot more traffic than the website
| intended.
| dusted wrote:
| 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.
| therealmarv wrote:
| 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/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... 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.
| [deleted]
| timwis wrote:
| I always worry about missing bits like code samples in iframes
| when switching to reader mode :/
| robotburrito wrote:
| Reader mode is awesome and it makes a lot of the web actually
| usable.
| kazinator wrote:
| I started making more use of reader more upon discovering that it
| can get around paywalls in many cases.
| jeromenerf wrote:
| Dammit, don't tell everyone, they will notice it.
| larodi wrote:
| 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 :)
| GrinningFool wrote:
| 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.
| subscribeNOW wrote:
| > 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!
| fergie wrote:
| I always assumed that Reader Mode was used pretty heavily.
| w0m wrote:
| i have read a total of 5 articles with it since introduction
| decade(s?) ago. The switch is just jarring
| dev_tty01 wrote:
| 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.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| > 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.
| k1m wrote:
| 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
|
| I'm currently trying to bring the PHP port up to speed here:
| 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/
| mft_ wrote:
| O/T, but thanks for Push To Kindle. I found the browser version
| so useful I bought the iPhone app - both to use and also to
| support you. Brought a whole new field of usefulness to my
| Kindle
| k1m wrote:
| Thank you! That's really nice to hear. (Appreciate the
| support too.)
| freediver wrote:
| Another robust solution is Tranquility reader which exists as
| an extension and has better accuracy than Readability at the
| expense of speed.
|
| https://github.com/ushnisha/tranquility-reader-webextensions
| Tarsul wrote:
| yes! I use this addon for firefox all the time. Usually I
| click on my "Tranquility!" button the moment the cookie
| notification pops up, no cookies needed ;) (good for articles
| via HN, also possible to circumvent _some_ paywalls)
| infogulch wrote:
| 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#...
|
| > 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 wrote:
| 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).
| up6w6 wrote:
| 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/Readabili...
|
| Google Chrome: https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller
|
| Mercury parser: https://github.com/postlight/mercury-parser
|
| [1] https://instantview.telegram.org/
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Is it possible to utilize the database of Instant View per-
| site parsers in a web browser or extension's reader mode?
| bspammer wrote:
| Another cool crowdsourced thing I discovered recently is
| SponsorBlock [1] which is an extension to automatically skip
| sponsored content in Youtube videos. Users contribute timings
| to the database that everyone else uses. It works remarkably
| well, any recent video with more than about 50,000 views is
| pretty much guaranteed to have timings submitted.
|
| [1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/
| k1m wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning Instant View, I hadn't come across
| that. We actually maintain something similar here:
| https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config
|
| We use these in our own tools and also get contributions from
| others, including Wallabag users:
| https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag
|
| Before it was sold, Instapaper used to have something
| similar. A public database of its site-specific extraction
| templates. We used that as the starting point for our
| repository.
| freediver wrote:
| Thanks to both of you for expanding my 'readable web'
| toolbox.
|
| What do you fallback to if the rule is not present or
| doesn't work?
| k1m wrote:
| In our case, we try to match using the XPath selectors
| that we have for the site. If we don't have any, or they
| fail to match anything for the title, author, or body, we
| then go to Readability and let it do its thing to try and
| extract whatever we're missing.
| freediver wrote:
| Makes sense. What does 'prune' and 'tidy' instruct parser
| to do?
| k1m wrote:
| Prune instructs the parser to remove any elements within
| the extracted article block that look superfluous. This
| can result in false positives, so we tend to disable it
| when we've gone to the trouble of creating site-specific
| extraction rules.
|
| Tidy determines if the source HTML should be cleaned up
| first with HTML Tidy - https://github.com/htacg/tidy-
| html5. If you're parsing the source HTML with an HTML 5
| parser, as we are now, it shouldn't be necessary any more
| (I think we actually ignore it now). We used it more
| before when we relied on libxml parsing, which often
| trips up on modern HTML.
| benzible wrote:
| FYI your API pricing page doesn't seem to load
| https://rapidapi.com/user/fivefilters
| mdoms wrote:
| Just reading through that code it seems like readbility is only
| intended to work on English language websites? Like it checks
| for nodes with class names matching
| /and|article|body|column|content|main|shadow/ and uses a
| minimum length of 140 characters for matching nodes that are
| reader-able. Seems a bit lazy for a company whose stated
| mission is "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource,
| open and accessible to all".
| dredmorbius wrote:
| My suspicion is that there are an increasing number of
| publishers who are intentionally severing compatibility with
| Readability.
|
| _Washington Post_ , I'm looking at you mofos. Chief reason
| I'll seek out any alternative news site for archival. It's been
| this way for about a year, if not more.
| jamil7 wrote:
| I wrote a Swift port of it last year for my app but it deviates
| from readability a fair bit as I tailed it a bit to my needs,
| I've considered cleaning it up and open sourcing it regardless.
| I know there is an Objective-C port floating around.
| freediver wrote:
| Do not clean it up just put it up there and let others do it!
| I'd be very interested in it, please reach out when you do.
| guessmyname wrote:
| I ported Mozilla's Readability library to Go a couple of years
| ago [1] and use it every day to power a custom RSS feed of
| Hacker News via Reeder [2]. This is not a novelty, many people
| have ported Readability to different programming languages over
| the years.
|
| [1] https://github.com/cixtor/readability
|
| [2] https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed
| agumonkey wrote:
| 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
| ZachSaucier wrote:
| 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/
| freediver wrote:
| Looks great! What does this use underneath? How is it different
| than Readability.js in terms of parsing output?
| yepthatsreality wrote:
| 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"?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| 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
|
| (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.
| amelius wrote:
| I wish somebody would create a DL/GAN/style-transfer tool to
| automatically change the style of any website into
| https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/
|
| (regardless of how the website is structured, so deleting the
| CSS doesn't count)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| On emissive / colour displays, this still is my preference:
|
| https://codepen.io/dredmorbius/full/KpMqqB
|
| On e-ink, the off-white / off-black colour palette is
| actually something of a probem, though the page otherwise
| remains highly readable.
|
| From the original page, the lack of margins is a problem.
| Text running straight into the gutter is a readability
| problem.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Checking installing on an older tablet: EInkBro works, though
| having it display colour is ... slightly disconcerting.
|
| But if you want to get a sense of the app, it's possible to do
| so.
| jabroni_salad wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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]
| fouc wrote:
| I'm guessing this won't work with Remarkable.
|
| Or what are some good e-ink devices for this I wonder?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Any Android-based device.
|
| Potentially in future, Linux-based devices which can run
| Android apps.
|
| I'm not a particular fan of Android. Its application
| ecosystem is a bonus though.
|
| Again, this is installable through F-Droid.
| Groxx wrote:
| Depending on how far you want to go, there are VNC
| clients[1], toltec has opkg-installable stuff including at
| least one browser[2] known to work, and there are full OS
| replacements that let you run a full linux GUI[3] which can
| almost certainly run a normal-ish desktop browser.
|
| So while this one won't work, there are options.
|
| [1] https://github.com/reHackable/awesome-reMarkable [2]
| https://toltec-dev.org/ [3]
| http://www.davisr.me/projects/parabola-rm/
| peterlk wrote:
| How can I implement my website such that it is optimally useful
| for browsers like this? Just avoid flashy stuff? Is there any
| way to list my blog somewhere as a friendly place to read? I'm
| spinning it up again after a year off for reasons that I will
| probably write about :)
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I've just poked through both the GetPocket site
| (https://getpocket.com/publisher/) and Mozilla's Readability
| Library GitHub page (https://github.com/mozilla/readability)
| without seeing obvious guidelines.
|
| My general suspicion is that adhering to a simple HTML5
| documemnt structure, and possible use of microformats
| (https://microformats.io/) goes a long way.
|
| Update: there's some discussion here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28301113
| k1m wrote:
| I haven't seen guidelines lately, but Readability.com,
| before it was shut down, did have a page that's archived
| here: http://web.archive.org/web/20160301180825/https://rea
| dabilit...
| bogomipz wrote:
| Could someone explain how Reader Mode on iOS devices is able to
| bypass login walls for new sites?
| tomiplaz wrote:
| My favourite and often used browser feature (Firefox).
| mvanbaak wrote:
| It's the only way to visit sites like medium.com ;P
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| Is there a keyboard shortcut for reader mode, in chrome?
| andy_ppp wrote:
| 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!
| acsigen wrote:
| 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
| zzo38computer wrote:
| 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.
| inetknght wrote:
| I used reader mode for a long time and liked it but stopped using
| it because it still let javascript run.
| black3r wrote:
| 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.
| bambax wrote:
| > _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)).
| funnyThing7 wrote:
| "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.
| Narishma wrote:
| I use it daily to deal with the epidemic of hard to read too low-
| contrast websites, which this article is ironically guilty of.
| 627467 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| SevenSigns posted an addon to do that here
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28287190 and there's an
| alternative here
| 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
|
| Try them out!
| emaro wrote:
| 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/
| blunte wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| pre wrote:
| 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.
| ldenoue wrote:
| 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
| Forge36 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Firefox for Android has reader mode.
| x-sp wrote:
| As does Opera
| neop1x wrote:
| and Brave (after enabling it in Settings)
| corentin88 wrote:
| 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.
| bvm wrote:
| I really love the reading the codebases for these, the original
| Arc90 Readability bookmarklet was really quite...readable when
| unminified.
| janandonly wrote:
| 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.
| puttycat wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Instapaper has this, and can even be set up to send a weekly
| digest.
| beervirus wrote:
| 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.
| BeetleB wrote:
| 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.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| This is really interesting, I might try it. I miss the printed
| newspaper/magazine reading I used to do (although I still do
| some).
| dang wrote:
| Please don't copy-paste comments on HN
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27921786). It lowers
| signal-noise ratio and isn't really how curious conversation
| works.
|
| If you want to refer to another post, that's fine of course,
| but in that case use a link and perhaps add some new info if
| any is relevant.
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| BeetleB wrote:
| Hi dang,
|
| Is this a new rule? I often find people copy/pasting older
| comments of theirs that is relevant to the current
| conversation.
| pvg wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=2&prefix=true&qu
| e...
|
| Six years of nopaste exhortations
| mesh wrote:
| When I was in graduate school way back in the 90s, I had an old
| dot matrix printer that I would use to print out the daily RFE
| / RI (Radio Free Europe) email news reports from Eastern
| Europe.
|
| Its a huge waste of resources over time, but I find its much
| easy to focus and take in the information sitting at a table
| and reading over printed word.
|
| I wonder if e-ink / paper devices might be able to replicate
| this now.
| ouid wrote:
| Paper isn't really that bad for the environment, right? That
| was an ad campaign to sell plastic or something. Paper trees
| are grown as crops and basically just fix carbon. The pulping
| has some local undesirable effects, but I don't think they have
| anywhere near the lasting impact of other human waste.
| S0und wrote:
| I straight up stopped reading. Just listen. I'm using
| NaturalReader extension, which has a good voice in the free
| tier. Even tho I use Firefox everywhere i just open an Edge,
| copy-paste a link and just listen to the article.
| rafael_c wrote:
| You can do similar on the Kindle or any other ereader. There's
| a chrome extension called 'send2kindle' that sends a simplified
| version of the webpage you have open directly to your device.
|
| I'll just open tabs on the browser of whichever articles or
| texts will consist of my morning reading diet that day and send
| them all to my Kindle. Very practical device to read and no
| more falling in a trap of continuous clicking on more and more
| links, while lending a crappy level of attention to the actual
| reading.
| vilified wrote:
| > Bad for the environment. Good for the brain.
|
| That's just bad for the environment two times lol
| fnord77 wrote:
| underrated comment
| saurik wrote:
| > I can now read wherever I want. Going to the mechanic? I just
| take some of these printed articles with me.
|
| To be fair, I can (and do) do the same thing with my phone.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Off topic w.r.t Reader mode, but reading on paper is much
| better than on the phone. Actually, _anything_ is better than
| the phone. My hierarchy is:
|
| Paper > ereader > monitor > phone
| jrgaston wrote:
| I like reader mode but lately I'll send an article to pocket
| (which cleans it up a lot) then I print it to a pdf which is
| saved in a folder in Dropbox and which is synched with my Kobo
| Elipsa, and with the Elipsa I can mark the articles up with its
| stylus. (Writing this out makes it sound a bit complicated
| which I guess it is.)
| fnord77 wrote:
| I'm the exact opposite - I love having books and articles on
| devices. Physical clutter is a problem for me so this is
| liberating.
|
| reading on my iphone or kindle doesn't seem to strain my eyes.
| marvindanig wrote:
| I read all my books on the iPad. No hassle at all.
| pkulak wrote:
| > Bad for the environment.
|
| Psst. Paper is a renewable resource and easy to recycle at
| least a couple times.
| marvindanig wrote:
| That's a spurious claim! Pulp harvesting often destroys the
| native flora and fauna, and the cost of lost forests and
| animal habitat cannot be recovered.
| yodsanklai wrote:
| https://www.theworldcounts.com/challenges/consumption/other-.
| ..
| somedude895 wrote:
| > Each ton of recycled paper can avoid the use of 17 trees;
| 1,440 liters of oil; 2.3 cubic meters of landfill space;
| 4,000 kilowatts of energy and 26,500 liters of water.
|
| > Paper is quite simple to recycle, yet 55 percent of the
| global paper supply comes from newly cut trees.
|
| You can buy recycling paper too, it's not pretty but at
| least you know it's made from recycled materials.
|
| Also, that page says we'll run out of fresh water in 18
| years and the source is literally a single quote from one
| person. Seems a bit sketchy.
| ratioprosperous wrote:
| Doing exactly this with a large format e-ink tablet has been
| revolutionary for me
| eagleislandsong wrote:
| Which e-ink tablet would you recommend?
| abyssin wrote:
| ReMarkable isn't perfect but I use it to read web articles.
| The issue I haven't solved with my ReMarkable is finding an
| alternative to the default synchronization system. I'd love
| to use Plato for reading on the ReMarkable, but then I'd
| lose the synchronization.
| mariusor wrote:
| Kobo devices have out of the box integration with Pocket,
| which Mozilla supports natively.
| marvindanig wrote:
| Proprietary tablet vs. a browser feature on the open web-
| which option would you take?
| BeetleB wrote:
| Kobo lets you install your own SW. There are open source
| reader SW for the Kobo, and they're better than Kobo's
| own reader.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| What reader(s) do you like / recommend?
|
| I've used FBReader, PocketBook (who sell their own ebook
| readers as well apparently), the NeoReader (default Onyx
| software), and have some familiarity with Kindle.
|
| PocketBook enables some (but insufficient) metadata
| editing. The NeoReader has an excellent UI/UX generally
| on BOOX devices, but has no management capability.
|
| I tend to have a large number of documents on my devices
| (1,000s). Management is critical.
| mariusor wrote:
| I'm not sure what exactly you're arguing against.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| I'm pretty happy with the Onyx BOOX.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521248
|
| Turns out I was wrong about security. _Password recovery_
| requires a separate cloud-based account. Setting a password
| does not.
| ameminator wrote:
| I'll be honest, this is my favourite feature of my Kobo - using
| Pocket to save webpages and articles and read them offline. It
| seems to accomplish a similar goal to what you do here -
| without the need for all that paper.
| Otek wrote:
| I doubt he will print as much, so your e-reader will have
| less environmental impact. All that plastic and components
| are certainly the equivalent of several, if not hundreds of
| reams of paper.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Cost is a _very rough_ indicator of footprint.
|
| A modest e-book reader runs about $200. That's the cost of
| about 3 cases of 20# letter-sized paper (10 reams/case), or
| 15,000 sheets of paper.
|
| At ~300 pages/book, that's about 50 books cost equivalent.
|
| Note that _printing_ output tends to run higher, at $0.01
| -- $0.25 per page (higher for colour inkjet and laserjet).
|
| Depending on ones reading patterns, the cost (and
| environmental impacts) of an ebook reader could well come
| out ahead. It's also generally easier to carry such a
| device than the equivalent number of printed books or
| documents.
| Thrymr wrote:
| And the marginal cost of adding articles to a device if
| you are already using it to read books is very low.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Correct, up to storage limits.
|
| That's not a minor consideration from me as I can easily
| fill 64--128 GB of total storage (about 30GB seem to be
| system + apps).
|
| That's not all books --- I keep a fairly large number of
| podcast episodes downloaded. But at about 5 MB/book, even
| an apparently generous storage quickly shows limits.
|
| I passed on the ReMarkable as its 16 GB storage (about
| 8GB available) only permits 1,600 books at 5 MB/book.
|
| (And that's without podcasts or audio.)
|
| The BOOX has a 64 GB onboard storage, maximum. I've got
| that near capacity in about 6 months, though a large
| share of that is podcasts. My preference would be 256 GB.
| Plus far better content-management capabilities on the
| device itself. I _think_ I could live within that.
|
| Retail cost is $20, falling by about half every 2 years.
| The minimising of eBook storage makes absolutely no
| economic sense.
| rpadovani wrote:
| I don't think he bought the Kobo only for reading webpages
| tho, so you cannot really do a direct comparison like this.
| canadianfella wrote:
| > hundreds of reams of paper.
|
| How did you come to this conclusion?
| 5faulker wrote:
| It's a nice compromise.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I have a Kobo and I used to do this. And while I enjoyed
| ereaders for many years, paper is still king. The Kobo's
| resolution is still not good enough, and being able to flip
| pages is still more convenient.
|
| The nice thing about the Kobo is you can install your own
| software, so there's still hope for a better interface.
| stuartd wrote:
| 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.
| ximm wrote:
| > 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.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Interesting, but doesn't seem to work for me.
| pmontra wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Yup, it didn't make the transition to Fenix. That was such
| a cool feature. Maybe I should downgrade.
| spupy wrote:
| 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.
| codq wrote:
| Pocket sometimes fails to save the article locally, and
| forces 'Web View', rendering it useless unless loaded with a
| data connection.
|
| I feel like Pocket could use some updates, it seems
| underloved from the Mozilla team, especially for an app that
| purportedly generates revenue for the company.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| That forced-web-view thing is absolutely maddening.
|
| I'd actually prefer a placeholder "we couldn't render
| this", which leaves the tagging tools available, to
| redirecting to the remote site.
| Veen wrote:
| Safari's Reading List feature does something similar. Or it's
| supposed to. In my experience it often fails to save articles
| so you can read them offline.
| spullara wrote:
| This is my most loved feature of Safari missing from Chrome by
| default. Edge has added it recently.
| zelphirkalt wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I recently started using this too.
|
| Now why can't websites just be written to work this way in the
| first place?
| shandor wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Thank you.
| shandor wrote:
| 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?
| classichasclass wrote:
| 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.
| CodesInChaos wrote:
| Afaik firefox mobile only allows a small number of
| whitelisted extensions.
| nick__m wrote:
| 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-ad...
| satellite2 wrote:
| Exactly, as some sites will remove content too fast and the
| reader mode button disappear before any possible attempt at
| clicking it
| shandor wrote:
| Yep. I also wouldn't care at all if "forcing" reader mode
| like this would most certainly break some pages. I wouldn't
| want to stay on pages like that anyway, so I would lose
| nothing.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| egypturnash wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Sssh, a Chrome PM might be reading!
| fsflover wrote:
| So more people will switch to Firefox, good!
| thrower123 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| underdeserver wrote:
| I read this post on reader mode.
| beyondcompute wrote:
| Reader mode in mobile Safari is basically one of the two things
| that keep me on iOS (the other one is dictation).
| classichasclass wrote:
| 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-a... )
| and auto reader view by domain or by domain subpages (
| 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 wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| TenFourFox uses sticky mode by default anyway. But you make a
| good point for others who might implement such a feature.
| midjji wrote:
| Nice
| kixiQu wrote:
| 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
| vermaden wrote:
| 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_abo...
| nayuki wrote:
| 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.
| matthewfelgate wrote:
| 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.
| robinoh wrote:
| reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r
| inanutshellus wrote:
| TIL!
| noman-land wrote:
| You are a god.
| arepublicadoceu wrote:
| > reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r
|
| F9 on Windows
|
| I use it all the time.
| perilunar wrote:
| command-alt-r on Mac/FF
|
| command-shift-r on Mac/Safari
| everdrive wrote:
| 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.
| clipradiowallet wrote:
| 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.
| jonplackett wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Which adblocker do you use? With ublock origin I almost never
| encounter sites where ads are visible.
| jonplackett wrote:
| 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!
| obscuren wrote:
| 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?
| dijit wrote:
| I think I have to share my incredulation; I always use Reader
| Mode on Safari iOS: lots of sites are quite literally unreadable
| otherwise.
| schlupfknoten wrote:
| Unfortunately, I have recently started encountering more sites
| where Safari just doesn't offer the Reader Mode option.
| asdff wrote:
| The arms race continues
| spideymans wrote:
| If you have to actively circumvent the efforts of your
| users to make your webpage more readable, you may have a
| massive problem with your underlying design culture.
| opdahl wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| FabHK wrote:
| And, in both macOS and iOS Safari, you have a per-website-
| setting to request reader view automatically. It's great.
| punnerud wrote:
| Hardpress on the AA in the URL-bar and you activate it directly
| (if it's available).
|
| Possible new safari feature: Make the text bold if reader mode
| is available
| fckthisguy wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| ...I just use adblockers.
| mywittyname wrote:
| This isn't as effective as it was in the past now that
| anti-adblocking is practically universal.
| LegitShady wrote:
| Haven't noticed any issues but maybe I don't visit the
| same websites as you.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| Yes, and it gives you -- Firefox -- the chance to fine tune
| your reading experience to that very moment. Sometimes you need
| a larger font size or more text/background contrast depending
| where you are. It's really useful.
| Meph504 wrote:
| I use it all the time to avoid a lot of modal popup article
| blockers and the like.
| rodolphoarruda wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| SevenSigs wrote:
| Haven't tried it but there is an addon to automatically enable
| reader mode:https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/auto-
| reader-v...
| frenkel wrote:
| That's super useful for some known bad sites that I use.
| Thanks!
| AdmiralAsshat wrote:
| > 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!
| soheil wrote:
| 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 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.
| abrowne wrote:
| 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.
| Saint_Genet wrote:
| You also get around many paywalls by activating reader mode.
| aimor wrote:
| 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?
| maddyboo wrote:
| 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.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a
| blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box.
| eganist wrote:
| > 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.
| eurasiantiger wrote:
| With iOS, for example, refreshing npr.org just turns off
| reader mode.
| nojito wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They redirect to another subdomain, so I don't think this
| will work. Thanks anyway!
| subscribeNOW wrote:
| > 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.
| OJFord wrote:
| Disabling JS also often works for the same reason. (But
| reader mode is great, nothing against it.)
| chrismorgan wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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."
| stiltzkin wrote:
| Highly recommend Instant View on Telegram:
| 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.
| lastgeniusua wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
|
| : )
| lastgeniusua wrote:
| don't really have much experience with JS or TS, but might
| try this later, thanks!
| bovine3dom wrote:
| 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.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| 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.
| sysadm1n wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| More or less. Here's various implementations:
|
| https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability
|
| Original JS library:
|
| https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...
|
| Specifically see here:
|
| https://github.com/masukomi/arc90-readability/blob/master/js...
| CrlNvl wrote:
| On FF, is there an extension that automatically turns on reader
| mode when you are reading an article?
| gizdan wrote:
| 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-
| rea...
| refracture wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Doesn't work on Chromium Brave. /tries not to cry /lays on the
| floor and cries alot
| aerojoe23 wrote:
| 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.
| q_andrew wrote:
| I use Microsoft Edge exclusively for its read aloud function --
| it doesn't require reader mode to be activated and has
| integration with Microsoft's 'natural voice' which is almost
| indistinguishable from regular speech. Also it will instantly
| start reading from whatever word you click on which helps with
| backtracking. The downside, of course, is having to use Edge.
| woldemariam wrote:
| +1 for Edge. Use it on my Macbook and love how it highlights
| the sentence it is currently reading and scrolls the page
| down automatically. It is not as good as Google Assistant on
| android. Google Assistant on android knows to skip past image
| captions and ads, and it knows when it has reached the end of
| an article; Edge simply reads everything it sees.
| q_andrew wrote:
| You'd think google would use the same architecture for
| chrome! I haven't found it to be nearly as useful.
| ygra wrote:
| I guess those parts are where Edge cannot use the same
| services Google uses anyway (since they're not allowed
| to). And if they have to provide their own TTS anyway,
| they can just as well improve over Chrome at that point.
| badhrink wrote:
| How to activate this in Google Assistant? Is there a
| special application or something? Or do we just have to say
| "Ok google read this <URL> " ?
| franciscop wrote:
| Oh that must be new but it looks so useful. I had eye laser
| last year and looked a lot for exactly something like that for
| my 3-4 days of literally just laying down and not doing much,
| but couldn't find anything like this. My plan was to open the
| Gutenberg project HTML books (or plain text) and have the
| browser read them, but nothing satisfied me (specially since
| there was no "pause/scrub" in the ones I did find). Ended up
| listening to audiobooks in youtube and that was good enough.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Wow, never tried the voices before and they are hilarious on
| Linux (tried en-GB).
| jayknight wrote:
| I just wish Firefox Focus had reader mode. It's my default
| browser on my phone, which gets me around free article limits
| on some sites, so having to open it in another browser can
| defeat that purpose.
| SquishyPanda23 wrote:
| Do you know how to enable this in Linux? I don't see a TTS
| option in reader mode on Firefox.
|
| EDIT: I figured it out. I needed to install speech-dispatcher.
|
| On Ubuntu
|
| > sudo apt install speech-dispatcher
| NAHWheatCracker wrote:
| It's available on Linux for me. I'm on Pop! OS 21. The
| "listen" option is a set of earphones at the top left of the
| page.
|
| The voices are awful to listen to, though.
| stuaxo wrote:
| Hilariously bad.
| barbinbrad wrote:
| For web developers, one thing to keep in mind with text to
| speech is that you can use the aria-hidden attribute to prevent
| things (like menus or ads) from being read.
|
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
| isaac21259 wrote:
| The text to speech goes through speech dispatcher which by
| default probably uses espeak. I believe there are better text
| to speech engines like festival which you should be able to
| have speech dispatcher use quite easily but I've never tried
| this.
| illegalmemory wrote:
| One of the little feature of reader mode I love is, if you time
| it correctly (before loading all javascript of the page) you
| can skip a lot of prompts ( subscribe to read / monthly limit
| reached and so on )
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Try hard refreshing the page _after_ you 're in reader mode.
| mywittyname wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before sites start rolling out
| anti-reader mode "features."
| nsxwolf wrote:
| I stopped using these modes years ago because of
| inconsistent results that I assume must be from reader-
| blocking tech.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I stopped using those sites, instead. I figure that if
| they're so far up in themselves that they want to employ
| such user-hostile design, I'm probably not missing much
| if I just move on and read something else.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It's already happenning. Just like adblockers, anything
| that makes life better for users is actively fought
| against.
| egypturnash wrote:
| It's already been done. Wired, for instance, only shows you
| the first paragraph of a story until you've made an account
| and logged in, even in reader mode.
| rawling wrote:
| Surely that's just any halfway-competent pay/sign-up
| wall, rather than specifically anti-reader mode?
| satellite2 wrote:
| Not necessarily as they still want to be referenced
| properly.
|
| The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and
| remove the paywall for those but with the progress of
| other search engine / social nets it's more complicated
| to paywall without hurting SEO.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > The workaround was to whitelist Google's spider ips and
| remove the paywall for those
|
| Isn't that against Google's own policies? I think they
| call it cloaking.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| For sites dependent on link-aggregator sites (such as HN,
| Tildes, Mastodon, Diaspora, etc.)[1] for spreading and
| sharing content, hard paywalls tend to very strongly
| discourage further readership and sharing.
|
| I'm aware that HN has multiple levels of penalties
| applied to sites / domains, for various reasons. Users
| may also flag inaccessible content. (I certainly do.)
|
| ________________________________
|
| Notes:
|
| 1. If you've determined that "etc." is doing much heavy
| lifting here, congratulations. The resources listed are
| highly encouraged.
| egypturnash wrote:
| If you wanna split hairs, sure. "Breaking reader mode" is
| a component of an access wall. For a while a lot of sites
| didn't have that, so reader mode would work to skip all
| that.
| morsch wrote:
| No tts in Firefox for Android, sadly. That'd be really useful.
| Is there no way for Android apps to use the built-in system
| tts?
| prirai wrote:
| Yes, there is. Styx Browser on Fdroid has implemented it and
| also many other powerful features. Give a try, won't look
| back.
| kzrdude wrote:
| There seems to be some ways to do it in linux, but haven't
| tried myself yet: https://askubuntu.com/questions/953509/how-
| can-i-change-the-...
|
| I'm not super fond of having to run any particular background
| service for this.
| busymom0 wrote:
| 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.h...
|
| It's available on iOS too which uses the built in reader mode
| of safari.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/ca
| n...
|
| My app allows you to change fonts too and it supports
| Montserrat font which looks visually similar to Product
| Sans.
| onkoe wrote:
| Please consider putting this on F-droid. Many people here
| don't use Google services and you're likely missing out on
| many downloads (including mine)
| busymom0 wrote:
| Thanks for the idea. I will research F droid and put it on
| there.
| mastrsushi wrote:
| 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.
| GrumpyNl wrote:
| The icon doesnt show on chrome latest version.
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(page generated 2021-08-25 23:00 UTC)