I think I have to share my incredulation; I always use Reader Mode on Safari iOS: lots of sites are quite literally unreadable otherwise.
The most underused browser feature: reader mode
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Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#12Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#13I 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
You should give it a try, I've never noticed any important parts missing.
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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#14I 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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#15I 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'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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#16Underused? 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
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!
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#17Many sites already work around this, and reader mode only shows a blank page or the contents of the disavow human rights box.
> 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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#18This 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
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#19In 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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#20I 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 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.