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Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better (unclutter.it)

212 points by phgn ↗ HN
Hey everyone!

In the last months I've been working on Unclutter, a modern reader mode browser extension. In contrast to all existing approaches, it unclutters articles by modifying their CSS instead of extracting the text content.

This results in a more visually pleasing result that reuses the original article style. The idea is to remove friction so you use the reader mode more often. There are a few more features around saving articles automatically and taking highlights -- more details are on the website.

The extension has about 400 active weekly users right now, mostly from organic web store traffic. Monetisation has proven to be hard and for freemium there would need to be much higher numbers anyways. Do you think I should keep working on the project?

121 comments

[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 183 ms ] thread
kazinator
It looks nice! Does it have some paywall-busting powers, like Firefox's built-in reader mode?

Quite often, you can get through many a paywall by switching to reader mode and then reloading the page. Previously hidden content appears.

phgn
Thank you!

Admittedly, paywall-busting doesn't work as well with Unclutter as with the text-extraction methods. But it's still effective for most sites and there are custom tweaks e.g. for nytimes.com.

I'm thinking about improving on this actually. It would be cool to fetch the page content from web archives automatically if it detects a paywall. Kind of like the "archive.is" links people post here all the time, but with less clutter.

kazinator
Is that paywall busting even an actual goal/requirement in reader mode, or just a fortuitous side effect of the way it does its "web clipping" (is that still a term?)
phgn
It's an intended side effect. The paywall banners are also just clutter to remove from the DOM, often the entire text is still there.

Technically, messing with paywalls is forbidden for Chrome extensions listed in the webstore (and detrimental for getting press coverage). Which is why no one advertises this.

satvikpendem
I use the Bypass Paywalls extension [0] for this, and it works great with Unclutter.

[0] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean

phgn
Is this the same extension as https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome?

I've been using the latter for years now too. It still doesn't work with hard paywalls like the ones on economist.com or wsj.com.

satvikpendem
No it's a fork that strips out tracking info like Google Analytics and adds new features on top of it. Works for all the sites I've tried it on.
hnthrow10282910
Might just be me, but the example photos (not the first two) don’t load on the landing page
phgn
Do you mean the example videos with the text next to them? Or the 2 rows of images at the very bottom of the page?

They are .webm and .webp. Which browser & browser version are you using?

me_bx
For me the videos look like images, both on Firefox and chromium on linux.

No play button is displayed, no video playback control bar either, and pressing on space bar does not start the video. Right-clicking over the video shows a context menu with "play" option.

It is confusing to see these as screenshots of the cluttered interface and no indication that these are videos.

phgn
Do the videos auto-play for you when they appear?

I made the bad decision of hand-coding the landing page in React, this is the result of it :)

riezebos
I think they have autoplay disabled, I have autoplay disabled as well and have the same experience. If I enable autoplay it works. (Firefox)
unsafecast
I have no idea if it's related, but on chrome on my phone most of the page was solid yellow. Took a while to realize I'm supposed to scroll and the things show up.

I don't like this 'trend' of the things appearing with an animation as you scroll, I find it irritating and sometimes confusing.

Anyway, the problem here seems to be that the threshold is way too high, it only triggers when you scrolled the whole content away.

phgn
I just lowered the scroll threshold on mobile, does that help?

The problem is that the example videos auto-play and can be quite distracting if they're visible by default.

unsafecast
I _think_ it's better. For me, it's still a bit weird when you're scrolling past the first one, but I think you just need a hint or something that the region is scrollable (my confusion comes from the fact that there needs to be a card-length empty space for the card to come in).
clnq
I would pay to have something like this that could also summarise articles with GPT-3.
phgn
Have you used other services that summarise articles?

What would be the workflow? Do you want to read the summary instead of the article, use it to decide whether to read, or something else?

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clnq
I've been using Explainpaper (https://www.explainpaper.com/) to get an introductory understanding of textbook chapters and technical articles. I want to do the same for news articles and specialised blogs.

Yes, I would like to see a one-paragraph summary of technical articles to decide if they are worthwhile to read. For news articles, the summary might be all I want to read.

I have very little time to read things online. I try to skim the introductory and closing paragraphs in articles I read, but some authors bury the "meat" of the matter among walls of text. And for someone like me, that knowledge is practically inaccessible. I also don't think I have the attention span for some very long technical texts. A plain English summary would enable me to read them.

To recap - I would like to see a GPT-3-like summary of the entire article. It would primarily help me by saving time reading technical texts - either by helping me digest them or by helping me understand whether the text is worth reading in the first place.

If article summaries were cached for each article, that would be fine for my use and probably more economical on your end. I do not want to get bespoke summaries for parts of the article or summaries answering questions.

phgn
Makes sense!

I've actually had a similar feature request before: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/297

Have you tried some of the existing solutions mentioned in the ticket? I'm curious if they solve the problem for you, and if not, what Unclutter could do better.

clnq
I took time to try all four examples in the feature request.

BlinkNotes didn't work for a technical reason, TLDR; it did not have AI capabilities - only crowdsourced summaries.

TLDR This was good but seemed to use an NLP algorithm they call "AI." So instead of summarizing articles, it seems to produce a bullet list of the essential text fragments. This is in contrast to the much easier-to-read conversational style summaries GPT-3 can provide. TLDR This also did poorly with some of the technical articles I have authored, sometimes extracting pieces of C++ code as meaningful text.

Summari worked very well for me. It summarized even quite technical articles well because it uses a conversational AI. Thanks for the recommendation.

If I had to name one key criterion that differentiates good summaries from bad, in my opinion, it would be the effective use of language. Conversational/language models like GPT-3 are proficient at absorbing much contextual information and synthesizing a short and effective summary. NLP algorithms are good at throwing away superfluous context, which is common in casual writing, but they do not seem to work well for technical writing or texts whose purpose is to explain concepts and where there is little superfluous context to throw away.

Perhaps for something like Unclutter, if the users mainly read news sites, then an NLP approach could be appropriate (it would be cheaper and works well for such content). But the ideal implementation for an article summarizer for me needs that summary-from-a-lot-of-context synthesizing capability.

phgn
Thank you for doing the research!

The big problem with current transformer-based models is the input limit. We'd probably need to split large articles and then summarize the summarizations of these chunks. And yeah I agree, Unclutter should work on any kind of article, not just on factual news.

Please let me know if you're still using Summari in a bit! They seem to focus on their hosted version, I'm curious why.

catchmeifyoucan
Digging this UI. It's actually really beautiful compared to regular ol' reader mode. The UI is nice, and it's a cool touch to see social comments. Nice work!

I love that you also opened source it! Which is a huge win.

It might also be nice to "auto-activate", so people don't forget it's running. Right now, I have to click the extension to run it.

If it could pass paywalls, I'd probably pay ("donate" might be a better term).

Any chance you could bring it to iOS as an extension? A lot of my reading is also happening on phone

phgn
Hey thank you! I'm really glad you like the extension.

There actually is an "auto-activate" feature you can enable in the settings. Is this what you had in mind?

Regarding mobile support, I know. I'm not sure how to handle mobile Chrome which doesn't allow extensions, but for Safari this should be possible. No guarantees when I can get to this though. See https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/529

catchmeifyoucan
Kind of - I don't even want to activate once. Can you run it in the background? And just run it by default (at least on websites you're confident about). I might forget it exists
morsch
Naturally this required the "Access your data for all web sites" permission -- most powerful/useful extensions need this permission. But I've been pretty conservative in adding extensions with it (as in, just two, including the obligatory UBO).

Why isn't there a permission where the add-on doesn't get to access anything until I activate it for a specific tab, and then it only gets to access to that specific tab? Unclutter would be most useful on websites where I'm not particularly worried about misuse, but I don't want it to be able to read my emails.

This is not meant as a dig at this add-on or its author, I have no reason to believe he's not trustworthy, I think it's a limitation of the add-on permission model.

simcop2387
I'd also love it if there was one that allowed for additional sandboxing. i.e. it can read anything but can never store or talk to the network or cause a network call to happen. I know that'd be harder to do but it'd also allow for a lot of nice add-ons to be made.
cxr
"Access your data[...] for a specific tab" basically describes what a bookmarklet does (where by "specific tab", you mean "a given page—the one loaded in the focused tab when you activate the bookmarklet").
phgn
It's possible for extensions to only get access when you activate it for a specific tab. If you want Unclutter to work this way you can manually set "Site access" to "On click" in the Chrome extension settings (this doesn't work on Firefox unfortunately).

The reason I enabled "all sites" by default is to make the automatic activation feature work, which used to be more powerful. Possibly it can be done with an optional permission now, I'll look into it: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/527

Thanks for the feedback! Also, if you don't like something you can always submit a PR ;)

morsch
Sorry, I should have been more specific, I'm on Firefox. Nice that it's already possible in Chrome.

It was intended to be a comment about the limited power of the permission model in Firefox, though I have now learned from the sibling comment that Firefox actually has the permission I was thinking of.

phgn
Yep, but extensions still have to adopt the more restrictive permissions.
dredmorbius
There's also a tremendous difference between:

1. "Extension sees data on pages for which it's activated, and might modify that all kept locally", and

2. "Extension sends all page information to The Cloud^W^W Somebody Else's Computer where it is probably being shared with umpteen third parties, advertising^W behavioural manipulation and surveillance organisations, and will be preserved in crystal until the Heat Death Of The Universe.

Why desktop, and most especially mobile platforms / operating systems fail to either distinguish or permit control between these two scenarios is ... utterly beyond me.

There is Steve Krenzel's recent account of being pressured, by both a Twitter marketing exec and the phone company requesting the feature, to track "when users leave their house, their commute to work, and everywhere they go throughout the day".

This should not even be possible, let alone invisible to the device owner.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33511016>

<https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1589700721121058817.html>

The reputational harm that this does to the company, to mobile computing, to Web 2.0, to the start-up sector, and to the infotech sector as a whole really cannot be overstated.

Burn it down.

wolfgang42
There’s no practical way to distinguish between these two options for web extensions: once the extension can fiddle with the HTML on the page, it can use that power to make network requests (trivially, by inserting <img> tags onto the page).
dredmorbius
Hrm...

That does make things more complicated.

The dynamic nature of HTML as a whole means that 1) page contents can change interactively and 2) follow-up network requests can be made.

Limiting that would be difficult, and might require something like, spitballing here:

- Limiting extension functionality to subtractive network requests, or specifically permitted requests. Given that I've just installed LibRedirect, which points surveillanceware sites (Twitter, YT, Reddit, Instagram, etc.) to open, less-surveilled alternatives, I'm already contradicting myself here.

- Limiting extension functionality to changing displayed content after an initial pre-render has been achieved. sort of:

  { Web } <-> { Unmodified fetch } <-> { Extension } <-> { Displayed content }
That ... obviously ... fails to work for any number of content blocking or tracker-blocking tools (uMatrix, Ghostery, amongst others).

This leaves us with the option of tools which are audited and certified as to behaviour, have some specifically limited sets of requests, and require those back-ends to treat any such requests in specific manners which preserve privacy and confidentiality. That's a lot more cumbersome, and doesn't work off simple allow/deny rules on-device.

Thanks for the reality slap.

enriquto
> The extension has about 400 active weekly users right now,

How do you know that? It sounds a bit scary that you are able to know this number.

sabellito
I have an addon published for Firefox and they provide usage stats, which includes Daily Active Users, despite the addon itself having no tracking at all.
phgn
I believe that is the number of installs in active browsers, not how often people interact with the extension (which is much lower).
lioeters
I was also skeptical at first, but the code is open source, and there's clear documentation on privacy policy and metrics collected.

https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/blob/main/docs/metri...

Bravo to the author, well done for earning the users' trust.

phgn
Yep there is usage reporting (which features people use), but it never includes the sites or domains you visit. Beyond the project being open-source, it's also bundled so the production code is a readable as possible for you to verify this.

Honestly the extension would not exist in its current form without this. Looking at the usage after releasing a feature is incredibly helpful to see if something is working.

gnicholas
This is publicly available for any Chrome extension in the Chrome webstore.
agumonkey
add nlp based automatic tagging and i'm set :)
phgn
Tagging for what specifically? What would you use the tags for?

I actually experimented with article topic-prediction for a few months, but assignment errors were annoying and it was not clear if it's useful at all.

agumonkey
main topic of the page, so you can switfly bookmark it with 1-3 tags preset for you. maybe i'm just a unorganized hoarder that can't use bookmark to save his life but i wanted to make that for years and never got started :)
phgn
Do you use bookmarks right now, and have you tried manual tagging?

I believe Pocket premium has AI-suggested article tags. Maybe something similar makes sense for Unclutter, but I'm not sure of the demand for it.

agumonkey
I sometime bookmark, but mostly tags.. or just hoarding lumps of links. Hmm thanks for the info, I didn't know pocket did that. Now I just need this as a standalone firefox extension :)

ps: in any case, my suggestion was a soft tongue in cheek, not pressing you, unless it excites you. And kudos on your results already.

phgn
Another question: do you look at your saved links frequently, for example to browse by the tag you assigned? What's the primary purpose of tagging?

I just created a ticket for this: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/595

agumonkey
I don't much because I lack proper auto-tagging, circular problem. tagging is half ergonomics (tagging is auto suggested in firefox ui, unlike folders which require selecting) half categorical, a bookmark can belong to many sets of tags instead of being in one folder (or duplicated)
Whiteshadow12
Tested this on pg essays, the social comments is a pretty cool feature, I initially thought you would also surface the footnotes, similar to gwern site (one site I doubt I'd ever use a reader mode on).

Lovely tool, in terms of things I would pay for, the actual reader mode is not really the thing I would pay for. What I would pay for would be, highest to lowest:

1. An awesome search engine that can search text I read, think being able to search text on the sites in your browser history, there was a service that did this called Memex, and Rewind seems like it's trying to do something similar.

2. Linked texts, e.g PG might say X then Naval says something in the same area.

3. Reminders about articles I read x period of time and might want to re read.

I'll think of other features I would be willing to pay for.

phgn
Thank you for the feedback, really interesting ideas.

> being able to search text on the sites in your browser history

I'm curious, have you used this in Memex when it was still supported?

> Linked texts, e.g PG might say X then Naval says something in the same area.

Do you mean direct hyperlinks and backlinks between articles? So if the Naval post references a PG essay, you'd see that while reading the PG essay?

> Reminders about articles I [...] might want to re read

How should it decide which article you want to re-read?

Whiteshadow12
Ignore the Linked text idea, in theory it is solved by the Memex like feature. It might lead to an over engineered trap.

Regarding the Memex like feature I did use it a lot, it worked like full text search for the HTML, they had a sync service that worked by importing your search history, I'm guessing they downloaded the HTML and stored it, so they could search against it. My usage of the service is a couple of years old so things might have changed, at the time it would crash when I did imports.

You already have search on highlights and full text on them, so maybe the Memex like feature isn't needed.

> How should it decide which article you want to re-read?

It could decide based on other users who also saved the article, this might require storing the data on your servers, maybe number of highlights made or just ask the users when they add it to their queue.

Nice extension, the more I use it the more I like it. I've even disabled Firefox reader mode in favor of this.

Hope you find a way to monetize, play around with other monetization strategies other than good-better-best or one size fits all price point. Maybe usage based on the queue? There might be heavy crowds of users who would have a higher willingness to pay for example the "Second Brain" crowd.

Links

Memex Site: https://memex.garden/

Recent Pricing Guide I've been working through:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33502567

Priceintelligently posts on hn: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=priceintelligently.co...

Some Lago Blog posts on pricing: https://www.getlago.com/category/product-billing

phgn
Yeah, I'm wondering why Memex disabled the search feature. It obviously didn't work out for them.

> It could decide based on other users who also saved the article

That's a cool idea, I'll think about it. Maybe it doesn't even need to be other Unclutter users. I already ingest almost every Hacker News post for the social annotations feature and there are APIs for web traffic stats.

Thank you for the links on pricing, that's very helpful. At least this Show HN has convinced me to keep trying for a bit longer :)

If you have any other feedback later, just email me, open an issue, etc. Thanks!

shermix011
1. There's one called Operand.ai which does exactly that.
phgn
Interesting. Do you use Operand regularly?
Whiteshadow12
I love the internet this is perfect thank you. Only issue is no Firefox for now.
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satvikpendem
Works great. Only thing I'd include is customizable text and background colors. I use an OLED monitor and I'd like to make the background pure black rather than simply grey like currently. I made a GitHub issue: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/537
phgn
Makes sense! Let me know if you want to try implementing this :)

How would you expose the setting in the extension UI?

satvikpendem
https://i.imgur.com/EzVONAD.png is how it's done in my current extension, perhaps you can make one of the bottom squares say "Custom color" and when clicked on, it would expose a color picker. Then save the choice in local storage or however you store data now. Dark Reader is also another great extension to look at to see how they did it.
dewey
This looks very neat, I know it's an edge case (And it's not great to build Safari extensions, been there) but do you have any plans for Safari support?
phgn
Not an edge case, I've been tracking this for a while: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/13

Someone else in this thread suggested a version for mobile Safari which made supporting this even more interesting. No promises, but hopefully I can get to this before the end of the year.

thewebcount
It would also be nice to know if this works in Orion. Orion is a WebKit-based browser on macOS and iOS that allows plug-ins like uBlock Origin. (You can download it here: https://browser.kagi.com/)
phgn
I believe they want to support Chrome extensions natively, but maybe that's not ready yet. Unclutter is not installable from the extension store right now.

I'm not sure what we can do, but let's track Orion support for Unclutter here: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter/issues/569

dewey
Great to hear, looking forward to it!
westcort
This bookmarklet does something similar and is browser-independent:

javascript:void%20function()%7Bjavascript:(function()%7Bvar%20a=Math.floor,b=document.querySelectorAll(%22p,%20title%22),c=%5B%5D,e=%22%22,f=%22%22,g=%22%22,h=0,k=0,l=%22%22,m=%22%22,n=window.open(%22%22,%22_blank%22);for(var%20d%20in%20b)%7Bvar%20i=b%5Bd%5D.textContent;i%26%26(c=c+%22%5Cn%22+i)%7Dfor(f=c,e=f.replace(/%5Cn/g,%22%20%3Cbr%3E%3C/br%3E%20%22),g=e.split(%22%20%22),h=0;h%3Cg.length;h++)k=a(g%5Bh%5D.length/3)+1,l=%22%3Cspan%20style='font-weight:bolder'%3E%22+g%5Bh%5D.substring(0,k)+%22%3C/span%3E%3Cspan%20style='font-weight:lighter'%3E%22+g%5Bh%5D.substring(k,g%5Bh%5D.length)+%22%3C/span%3E%20%22,%22.%22==g%5Bh%5D.substring(g%5Bh%5D.length-1,g%5Bh%5D.length)%26%26(l+=%22%3Cspan%20style='color:red'%3E%20*%20%3C/span%3E%22),m+=l;n.document.write(%22%3Chtml%3E%3Cp%20style='font-size:40;line-height:200%25;font-family:Arial'%3E%22+m+%22%3C/p%3E%3C/html%3E%22)%7D)()%7D();

https://www.locserendipity.com/Hyper.html

phgn
Yep, there are lots of ways to do something similar. Reader modes are also built into Safari & Firefox directly.
dredmorbius
For what it's worth, I do this manually through a combination of uMatrix element removal and custom CSS stylesheets (applied via the Stylish CSS manager browser extension). I've experimented with both general and more specific clean-up rulesets.

I'll be the first to admit that this requires some knowledge of CSS. Or, in my case, turned out to be how I learned most of what I know about it ;-)

There are a few general observations I've made over the years:

1. A whole lot of Web design is absolute crap. Or as I put it, "Web design isn't the solution, Web design is the problem."

2. Less is virtually always more. I'm constantly shocked at how much calmer the experience of reading a site to which sidebars, recommendations, social-media link-litter, advertising, and of course, autoplay video and audio, have been removed.

3. There's a massive amount of shitty HTML out there.

4. Content extraction ... can work, and surprisingly well for some sites. I'd built an html-xml parser for the Washington Post which reduces news articles to about 1% of their original size, and tremendously improves readability. Those tend to have to be configured for specific sites or content engines, however.

5. That said, there's a lot of re-use of content engines, and some rules can prove quite generalisable. But ...

6. ... There's also a lot of churn, and rules which work at one point in time can fail spectacularly at another. Determining what version of the generator is being used for a specific request is ... difficult.

7. Often the most dramatic improvement is simply to dump plain text of the main meat of an article and re-apply formatting to that. This is of course manual, but adaptive and ... reasonably quick. What also becomes rapidly apparent is that site styling and markup offer very little additional benefit or structure to the core content.

8. For almost all commercial sites, there's virtually no use of bold/strong, and little of emphasis, outside of advertising or ancillary content. Simply nuking <b> and <strong> tagged-content is remarkably effective at trimming crud. Often it's the only reliable way to do so.

phgn
Yeah, parsing & cleaning up HTML will always be a heuristic that fails sometimes.

I'd highlight your point nr. 5. A very large percentage of articles use Wordpress or other website builders. Once you support a few large sites your coverage drastically increases.

With Unclutter I also found it helpful to have an automated fallback -- if the text content of the page reduces too much, it disables some of the content block methods one by one.

drexlspivey
Neat! It would be useful if the core logic was a library so you could fetch a webpage unclutter it and and save to a file or send as email.
iudqnolq
I know mobile Firefox extensions are a big pain for a small userbase but that'd be my #1 feature request.
gnicholas
> Monetisation has proven to be hard

What paths have you taken/considered? Given that this is open source, how would you get users to pay?

phgn
Additional premium features around the "article library" aspect of the extension. So for example an account to access it from mobile devices, AI topic classification, additional customisation etc.

I think it's hard to make money from reader modes alone, with so many free alternatives. But you know more about that topic than I do. Any suggestions?

indit
This is great. Could you add context menu to go reader mode directly from a link? This will be great for accompanying HN.
phgn
There is a context menu entry ("Open link with Unclutter")! It might just be buried in the list if you have a lot of extensions?
thunderbong
This is really well done. The 'reader mode' is very clean. I really like the 'Table of Contents' that show up on the left as well as whether the article has been scrolled to the end (reading completed).

Certain features like widening and reducing the width of the 'reader mode', as well as changing font size, I've not seen earlier. The highlighting feature is also great.

The 'Library', which shows list of pages I've uncluttered and highlights is awesome!

On top of that, the fact that it is open source, is fantastic.

Kudos for all the work and providing to everyone for free.

You've already provided an 'Export Data' option as well!

In terms of monetization, I can think of -

1. import from that exported CSV

2. seamless sync when I'm using different browsers or systems. Essentially, a paid account via which the sync happens seamlessly.

All in all a fantastic piece of open source software. Thank you!

phgn
Thank you for the feedback, I'm glad it resonates!

I'm already working on both of your suggestions, hopefully this will be possible within the next 2 weeks :)

piyush_soni
Just tried a bit, looks nice!
phgn
Thanks for trying it! Is there anything that could work better?
piyush_soni
Just a few. Enabling it on a few sites doesn't work as expected at all, and the add-on should probably be disabled on those - for example Twitter. First, it tries to enable the dark mode on Twitter, but the tweets itself are all gone (the only thing you see is the heading sections). And when you disable the extension to return to the normal mode, the dark mode remains on tweets (central section) for example, while the rest of it turns white again. That's a bug. I think you might need to crowdsource which websites it doesn't work fine with.
pugets
This is the most useful thing I've seen on HN since... well, I don't know when. Thanks a lot OP. Keep working on it.
phgn
Thank you for saying that! :)
_nalply
Playing the devil's advocate: Why is Firefox Reader mode not good enough?

And also please note that Mozilla has their algorithm in the open here: https://github.com/mozilla/readability

atchoo
I just wish we could remove the toolbar that I don't need yet is permanently stuck at the top.
phgn
It may be possible to hide that with custom user styles: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/1069513

Looking at that link, wow -- I didn't realise the Firefox reader existed for over 7 years now.

atchoo
I have tried that in the past but it didn't work. Undocumented workarounds like this don't age well over seven years!
uuencode8
I am ashamed to advertise it so bluntly but I wrote a similar tool that might address some of the above requests. The browser extension works with all desktop browsers, Firefox Beta/Nightly on Android (that's how I use it) and with Kiwi Browser on Android. The IOS shortcut has only been tested via appetize.io. There's a sort of sync - RSS and a dedicated web page. Bypasses some paywalls and most ublock/adbock blockers.

https://web2doc.net

phgn
Oh nice! Seems like "send articles to Kindle" is its main selling point?
uuencode8
Not only Kindle. There are e-readers with Dropbox integration and RSS is still widely used. My own scenario (no matter phone or computer):

- I come to a page I want to read later, a page behind a soft paywall, a page with a "switch off your add blocker" popup, page with tons of JS, popups, videos that takes forever to load and one has to close this and that while scrolling down

- It takes one click (2 to 4 taps on mobile) to send the page to web2doc and forget

I read the content directly in the web channel or (1)Feeder reminds me about the new article(s) within half an hour.

(1) Feeder: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.nononsenseapps.feeder/