The most underused browser feature: reader mode • Hacker News Board

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#221

Post by GrinningFool » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:42 PM UTC

larodi wrote: post #141

one little known feature of reader mode, no matter if firefox's or safari/mobile is that more often than you would expect, it kind of magically goes through pay-walls. so you get to see articles that require subscription or payment or else, with a single click. this happens so often that makes one wonder whether is due to some devs being lazy (hiding the actual content) or is by intent kept for savvy readers. also do…

The less we talk about great things like reader mode, the longer it will be before it's broken by default on the websites that need it most.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#222

Post by zzo38computer » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:43 PM UTC

I would want to use my own styles or just the default HTML styles, as one (I don't want it to use big font sizes, narrow text, etc; I want to use my own settings please, and you can use your own settings please). But also, will wanting ARIA view, where the accessible tree is formatted (this would also allow forms, etc to work). However, the accessible tree seems to be missing some important information too, such as whether or not text is fixpitch, strong, emphasis, etc (as far as I can tell it is missing, anyways; trying a simple web page with different formatting and displaying the accessible tree seems to lose this information). Sometimes simply disabling CSS and JavaScripts fixes it a lot, and avoids a lot of annoyances. Some forms don't work if CSS is disabled, because they replace the widgets with their own (I really don't like this); the ARIA attributes are there though, which is supposed to allow it to display it properly even if the styles are disabled, but simply disabling CSS won't do that; it is necessary to parse the ARIA attributes too. But to do better might require both the accessible tree and the DOM tree.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#223

Post by lastgeniusua » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:50 PM UTC

bovine3dom wrote: post #45

lastgeniusua wrote: post #34

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 : )

don't really have much experience with JS or TS, but might try this later, thanks!

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#224

Post by guessmyname » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:54 PM UTC

k1m wrote: post #70

Any developers who'd like to contribute to improving how article content is extracted from web pages should check out Mozilla's Readability repository: https://github.com/mozilla/readability I'm currently trying to bring the PHP port up to speed here: https://github.com/fivefilters/readability.php We use an older version as part of our article extraction for Push to Kindle: https://www.fivefilters.org/push-to-kindle/

I ported Mozilla’s Readability library to Go a couple of years ago [1] and use it every day to power a custom RSS feed of Hacker News via Reeder [2]. This is not a novelty, many people have ported Readability to different programming languages over the years.

[1] https://github.com/cixtor/readability

[2] https://github.com/cixtor/rssfeed

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#225

Post by nicbou » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

mperham wrote: post #196

My advice to bloggers: if your blog readability is improved by activating Reader mode, you have a styling bug to fix. Two universal improvements: 1. Bump up your font size. 2. Increase contrast.

3. Remove all the crap that isn't the article the user came for

I don't use Reader mode for readability, but to remove all the clutter on the page.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#226

Post by benzible » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:55 PM UTC

k1m wrote: post #159

up6w6 wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the Instant View[1] crowdsourcing model where people write templates for each website could boost a lot these parsers (hope they open source it soon). Its just impossible to make these extensions work for every single website with some simple heuristics. Check the codebase of some popular parsers: Firefox (already mentioned): https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/master/Readabili... Google Chrome: htt…

Thanks for mentioning Instant View, I hadn't come across that. We actually maintain something similar here: https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config We use these in our own tools and also get contributions from others, including Wallabag users: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag Before it was sold, Instapaper used to have something similar. A public database of its site-specific extraction templates. We used…

FYI your API pricing page doesn't seem to load https://rapidapi.com/user/fivefilters

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#227

Post by k1m » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 5:58 PM UTC

freediver wrote: post #186

k1m wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for mentioning Instant View, I hadn't come across that. We actually maintain something similar here: https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config We use these in our own tools and also get contributions from others, including Wallabag users: https://github.com/wallabag/wallabag Before it was sold, Instapaper used to have something similar. A public database of its site-specific extraction templates. We used…

Thanks to both of you for expanding my 'readable web' toolbox. What do you fallback to if the rule is not present or doesn't work?

In our case, we try to match using the XPath selectors that we have for the site. If we don't have any, or they fail to match anything for the title, author, or body, we then go to Readability and let it do its thing to try and extract whatever we're missing.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#228

Post by zzo38computer » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 6:04 PM UTC

hollerith wrote: post #170

The main reason reader mode is "underused" is that for a substantial fraction of pages, it does not work. Because of the way the human motivational architecture works, if there were a reader mode that always worked, its rate of usage would be many times higher than the usage rates of the current crop of reader modes. But of course, there is no way to create a reader mode that works for all web pages -- and that fact…

Depending what you are making, different protocols can be good (Gemini may be good for some things, NNTP may be good for some things, IRC may be good for some things, etc).

Gemini file format also could be usable independently of the protocol, although I do not know of any implementations.

I think that sometimes you might want to use Gemini without TLS (it is good they have it, but I am not sure that requiring it is so good), so my proposal is to make the new URI scheme "insecure-gemini:" for this purpose. In this mode, client certificates won't work, so TLS will still be required if you want to use client certificates.

Also, unfortunately curl is not implementing Gemini protocol; adding that might help to increase its usage too, since then you can at least download files from it easily. However, I have seen discussions and some of them are valid concerns. For example, I think -k should not be the default; doing it different for different protocols doesn't seem like good to me. You can still specify -k yourself if you want to do. Also the patch does not implement redirects, even if -L is specified; it ought to be fixed to allow -L to work. Allowing longer URLs might also help.

Furthermore, a better web browser will need to be made, excluding half of the stuff and implementing the other half of the stuff differently, before adding some more.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#229

Post by morsch » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 6:06 PM UTC

aerojoe23 wrote: post #14

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…

No tts in Firefox for Android, sadly. That'd be really useful. Is there no way for Android apps to use the built-in system tts?

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#230

Post by morsch » Wed, Aug 25, 2021, 6:10 PM UTC

pmontra wrote: post #107

alkyon wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yup, it didn't make the transition to Fenix. That was such a cool feature. Maybe I should downgrade.