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.
The most underused browser feature: reader mode
101–110 of 366 posts
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#102I'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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#103I think I have to share my incredulation; I always use Reader Mode on Safari iOS: lots of sites are quite literally unreadable otherwise.
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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#104I always choose reader mode on mobile if applicable. I'm wondering why some websites don't have reader mode.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#105> 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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#106I might be the minority here, but this is why I use Edge on Windows. It's, basically, Chrome with a reader mode.
Chrome apparently has a flag for this under chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode I tried flag in Brave ("brave://") but it is not working. Works great in Firefox.
>Chrome apparently has a flag
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.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#107A 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.
Interesting, but doesn't seem to work for me.
You're right. I checked with the new Firefox (the one with the "too many taps" GUI from one year ago) and it doesn't work anymore.
I'm using the old Firefox on my main phone and it explicitly says "Saved offline" when I bookmark a Reader Mode page. The new Firefox on the backup phone says "Bookmark saved".
One more reason to stay on the old Firefox.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#108I 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…
Wow, never tried the voices before and they are hilarious on Linux (tried en-GB).
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you know how to enable this in Linux? I don't see a TTS option in reader mode on Firefox. EDIT: I figured it out. I needed to install speech-dispatcher. On Ubuntu > sudo apt install speech-dispatcher
It's available on Linux for me. I'm on Pop! OS 21. The "listen" option is a set of earphones at the top left of the page. The voices are awful to listen to, though.
Hilariously bad.
Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode
#110I think I have to share my incredulation; I always use Reader Mode on Safari iOS: lots of sites are quite literally unreadable otherwise.
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.
…I just use adblockers.