Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The most underused browser feature: reader mode

frankgroeneveld.nl

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 366 posts

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#91

Post by spupy »

pmontra wrote: post #57

A 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.

That sounds almost exactly like the functionality that Firefox' Pocket provides. The app downloads a reader view of everything you put in there so you can read offline.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#94

Post by pre »

I press it as soon as I see a popup about cookies or login or sales or basically anything at all.

I press it when there's a paywall.

I press it when the site doesn't do dark-mode.

I press it when adverts become annoying.

There also exists an auto-reader-mode plugin that you can tell to always open that site in reader-mode in future.

Reader mode is great. Hope it doesn't become popular so website start trying to stop it working.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#95

Post by [deleted] »

shandor wrote: post #58

My most wanted feature for Firefox right now is the ability to right-click (or long-press on mobile) the link and choose "Open Link in Reader mode" exactly like they already offer for "open Link in New Private window". I think that would be even more important than the Private shortcut, with the amount of unnecessary crap the websites try to cram on your screen.

[deleted]

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#96

Post by zelphirkalt »

I use it on a daily basis. Without it a lot of websites are unusable for me. I just want to read the content, I do not wish to see the ads or interactive whatever. I want content. It is especially helpful, when websites manage to become unreadable without loading JS, because somehow they screwed up their CSS so badly, or it does not exist, without loading JS. Reader mode basically saves those websites from becoming instantly closed tabs.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#97

Post by barbinbrad »

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…

For web developers, one thing to keep in mind with text to speech is that you can use the aria-hidden attribute to prevent things (like menus or ads) from being read.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#98

Post by infogulch »

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/

ArchiveBox is a tool that downloads web pages and saves them in various different formats: warc, pdf, rendered png, plain text. I wonder what it uses for plain text extraction and if the readability repo would be useful for that purpose.

Edit: Oh neat it does actually. https://github.com/ArchiveBox/ArchiveBox/wiki/Configuration#...

> Archive method SAVE_READABILITY

> Extract article text, summary, and byline using Mozilla's Readability library. Unlike the other methods, this does not download any additional files, so it's practically free from a disk usage perspective. It works by using any existing downloaded HTML version (e.g. wget, DOM dump, singlefile) and piping it into readability.

Re: The most underused browser feature: reader mode

#99

Post by Kim_Bruning »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #96

I use it on a daily basis. Without it a lot of websites are unusable for me. I just want to read the content, I do not wish to see the ads or interactive whatever. I want content. It is especially helpful, when websites manage to become unreadable without loading JS, because somehow they screwed up their CSS so badly, or it does not exist, without loading JS. Reader mode basically saves those websites from becoming i…

I recently started using this too.

Now why can't websites just be written to work this way in the first place?

Post reply on HN