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The most underused browser feature: reader mode

frankgroeneveld.nl

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Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#251

Post by jayknight »

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…

I just wish Firefox Focus had reader mode. It's my default browser on my phone, which gets me around free article limits on some sites, so having to open it in another browser can defeat that purpose.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#252

Post by mdoms »

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/

Just reading through that code it seems like readbility is only intended to work on English language websites? Like it checks for nodes with class names matching /and|article|body|column|content|main|shadow/ and uses a minimum length of 140 characters for matching nodes that are reader-able. Seems a bit lazy for a company whose stated mission is "to ensure the Internet is a global public resource, open and accessible to all".

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#253

Post by dredmorbius »

_t9ow wrote: post #139
ratioprosperous wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing exactly this with a large format e-ink tablet has been revolutionary for me

Which e-ink tablet would you recommend?

I'm pretty happy with the Onyx BOOX.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27521248

Turns out I was wrong about security. Password recovery requires a separate cloud-based account. Setting a password does not.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#254

Post by dredmorbius »

BeetleB wrote: post #194
marvindanig wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Proprietary tablet vs. a browser feature on the open web–which option would you take?

Kobo lets you install your own SW. There are open source reader SW for the Kobo, and they're better than Kobo's own reader.

What reader(s) do you like / recommend?

I've used FBReader, PocketBook (who sell their own ebook readers as well apparently), the NeoReader (default Onyx software), and have some familiarity with Kindle.

PocketBook enables some (but insufficient) metadata editing. The NeoReader has an excellent UI/UX generally on BOOX devices, but has no management capability.

I tend to have a large number of documents on my devices (1,000s). Management is critical.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#258

Post by omaranto »

dredmorbius wrote: post #240
nicbou wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not absolutely necessary to remove it, but when reading the article it should not be front-and-centre on the page. That means: - Single-column layouts. Sidebars suck. - No fixed-position elements. Especially not headers or footers, though fixed sidebars are also almost always a mistake. (There can be some benefit for reference / tools, but only about one time in a thousand that they're actually used.) On desktop…

> - Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already.

You mean you want two scrollbars? One from the web page and one from the browser window. That seems like an odd choice.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#259

Post by nicbou »

dredmorbius wrote: post #240
nicbou wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not absolutely necessary to remove it, but when reading the article it should not be front-and-centre on the page. That means: - Single-column layouts. Sidebars suck. - No fixed-position elements. Especially not headers or footers, though fixed sidebars are also almost always a mistake. (There can be some benefit for reference / tools, but only about one time in a thousand that they're actually used.) On desktop…

I'm curious to hear your thoughts about the layout on allaboutberlin.com. I built this website to be as pleasant as possible for the readers, but perhaps I've been staring at it for too long...

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#260

Post by dredmorbius »

omaranto wrote: post #258
dredmorbius wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not absolutely necessary to remove it, but when reading the article it should not be front-and-centre on the page. That means: - Single-column layouts. Sidebars suck. - No fixed-position elements. Especially not headers or footers, though fixed sidebars are also almost always a mistake. (There can be some benefit for reference / tools, but only about one time in a thousand that they're actually used.) On desktop…

> - Put in a motherfucking scrollbar already. You mean you want two scrollbars? One from the web page and one from the browser window. That seems like an odd choice.

Presently the fashion appears to be none.

Worse: the scrollbars which do exist are indicator-only, they cannot be used to actually navigate on the page.

On the four mobile devices I routinely have access to, none has an actual grabbable persistent scrollbar for navigation.

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/0hgfswmoti3fi5zgftjecq

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21356511

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