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
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
+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.
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.
open a page you want to be read in Chrome, active google assistant and say 'Read It'. It also works with other Chromium based browsers (Brave and Edge).
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 )
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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 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.
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.
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.
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!
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
365 comments
[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadI'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
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.
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.
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.
In opera mobile you can save reader mode pages in mhtml, it's great alternative to webarchive
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!
chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics
Accessibly has a "show simplified view" which seems comparable
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.
Possible new safari feature: Make the text bold if reader mode is available
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.
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.
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.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psEX5jPkYiw
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.
Isn't that against Google's own policies? I think they call it cloaking.
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.
Though I guess this extension is less useful now that many sites are purposely breaking reader mode.
I'm not super fond of having to run any particular background service for this.
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.
On the whole I think I'll stick with Harmonic, but it looks like it has some potential.
My app has reply push notifications too which I don’t think any of the other HN apps have.
As for the font, Product Sans is not legally allowed to be used by third parties as far as I am aware:
https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/102262/can...
My app allows you to change fonts too and it supports Montserrat font which looks visually similar to Product Sans.
EDIT: I figured it out. I needed to install speech-dispatcher.
On Ubuntu
> sudo apt install speech-dispatcher
The voices are awful to listen to, though.
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
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.
Preferences > Websites > Reader > When visiting other websites: On
command-shift-r on Mac/Safari
F9 on Windows
I use it all the time.
: )
[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...
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. :)
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 tried flag in Brave ("brave://") but it is not working. Works great in Firefox.
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.