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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

#61

Post by AdmiralAsshat »

> I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default.

What? The browser made by the company that derives 90% of its revenue from ads doesn't want to show you a button that can remove the ads? I am shocked!

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#63

Post by abrowne »

Personally, I found reader mode missed just enough — like images loaded with js or footnotes referenced in an article — that it was more trouble than it was worth. And as much as I liked the "readability", I missed missed seeing the different designs, fonts and so on. (Who would want to read all books with exactly the same layout and typeface‽)

Now I have a collection of user stylesheets I use with Stylus to improve sites I read a lot. I especially often remove fixed toolbars and adjust font size and line height. I also use the browser zoom feature a lot to get one-off sites to a better reading text size.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#65

Post by NAHWheatCracker »

SquishyPanda23 wrote: post #56
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…

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.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#67

Post by gizdan »

CrlNvl wrote: post #36

On FF, is there an extension that automatically turns on reader mode when you are reading an article?

Yes. I've been using Automatic Reader View[0]. Though, to be honest, this should be an option directly in Firefox.

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/automatic-rea...

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#69

Post by tangoalpha »

I have been using reader-mode on Firefox and Chrome for long.

Not just for better readability, but also most content behind paywalls is accessible with readermode.

(May be because, most of the paywalls on news websites load all initial content, and then either truncate the content or hide the content using javascript, and hitting the paywall renders the page again without a lot of the CSS and JS that is used for hiding the content behind the paywall).

Hopefully, this content doesn't have those paywall service providers to start working around reader modes.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#70

Post by k1m »

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/

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