The most underused browser feature: reader mode (opens in new tab)

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.

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/

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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?

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

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-sh...

I wish more Chrome users use this to avoid the feature removed.

> 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!

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.

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

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...

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.

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.

I always assumed that Reader Mode was used pretty heavily.

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

reader mode shortcut on ff: ctrl-alt-r

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

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?

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

> 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)).

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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/

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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...

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

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

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.

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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”?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

My favourite and often used browser feature (Firefox).

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

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

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

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. :)

The icon doesnt show on chrome latest version.

I read this post on reader mode.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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

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

You also get around many paywalls by activating reader mode.

Nice

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.

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...

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.

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.