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Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

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Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#31

Post by phgn »

morsch wrote: post #30
phgn wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 option…

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.

Yep, but extensions still have to adopt the more restrictive permissions.

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#32

Post by phgn »

agumonkey wrote: post #26
phgn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 :)

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.

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#33

Post by me_bx »

phgn wrote: post #8
hnthrow10282910 wrote: post #7

Might just be me, but the example photos (not the first two) don’t load on the landing page

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?

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.

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#34

Post by phgn »

me_bx wrote: post #33
phgn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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 :)

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#36

Post by phgn »

unsafecast wrote: post #21
hnthrow10282910 wrote: post #7

Might just be me, but the example photos (not the first two) don’t load on the landing page

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 a…

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.

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#37

Post by phgn »

Whiteshadow12 wrote: post #28

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…

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?

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#38

Post by 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

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#39

Post by satvikpendem »

phgn wrote: post #4
kazinator wrote: post #3

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.

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…

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

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

Re: Show HN: Unclutter – Reader mode, but better

#40

Post by phgn »

leipert wrote: post #18
phgn wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Not the parent, but Safari on iOS. https://caniuse.com/webm

I just added .mp4 fallbacks, thanks for the tip!
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