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It's really nice that browsers offer reader modes, but they are frustratingly incomplete. Really, let's switch to a user perspective once and consider - what i

It's really nice that browsers offer reader modes, but they are frustratingly incomplete. Really, let's switch to a user perspective once and consider - what if I always want reader mode? This is technologically complete impossible and all the solutions are a band-aid. Firefox and others' attempts rely on the page authors' goodwill. But some pages will always attempt to frustrate reader modes. Alternative approaches for content extraction use machine learning such as [1], but they of course need to be updated for culture- language- and technology-specific changes. It's a mess and will remain so for the foreseeable future. [1] https://github.com/dragnet-org/dragnet https://github.com/dragnet-org/dragnet

classichasclass 5y ago
I specifically wrote always-available, "sticky" (default: stays Reader View even if you go to another page) and automatic (goes auto on subpages or entire domains, as you specify) Reader View support built-in to TenFourFox to help out on slower systems.
paxys 5y ago
It's a mess by design. In an ideal world no browser would need a reader mode, because pages themselves would be reader-friendly by design. Page authors, of course, are instead more interested in optimizing for advertising and tracking. Reader mode, much like adblock extensions, works directly against their interests. In fact we wouldn't even need any new web standards to implement something like this. Any website following the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and using the correct page structure and aria- tags should be fully semantically parsable and displayable in any format or medium.
- Moru 5y ago
  I'm sure they can live without my views. If I can't read the page I can always press the back button. I'm not going to buy anything from any ads anyway so no loss on either side except a few seconds of time lost for me. Just got a link to a documentation for an API that I can't read because of too low contrast. Dark Reader plugin nicely fixed it so didn't even have to try reader mode. It sucks to get old anyway, you young people don't have to make it worse. You will be in the same seat in 20-odd years so plan for it :-)
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    "I'm not going to buy anything from any ads anyway" The purpose of ads is often to get you to just recognize the brand (and/or associate positive feelings with it) so that if you are ever in the market for their products you'll be more likely to choose their brand over a "no-name brand" (ie. one that you haven't seen ads for). So you might think you're immune to advertising, but you probably aren't.
    - Seirdy 5y ago
      I offset these impacts by actively avoiding brands I recognize from unsolicited ads, and I encourage everyone to do the same.
    - Moru 5y ago
      Yes, That's why I use adblockers everywhere but that sometimes breaks the page and then I press the back button.
- BFLpL0QNek 5y ago
  There was a lot of stuff/buzz around the semantic web in the early 2000s. I’ve been out of web for a long time but it seems to of mostly died with the advent of React and the single page web application. Now it looks like everyone apart from public government sites with strict accessibility requirements just don’t bother putting the effort in.
  - phgn 5y ago
    I think SEO is a large reason why popular sites do bother with semantic tagging.
    - fleddr 5y ago
      True, but at the same time there's an incentive against making semantics too good. The separation of data from presentation competes with the need/desire to monetize. For example, somebody had build an app that scrapes free recipes from the web, so that it's shown without ads and the ridiculous fluffy lectures that are typically part of it. Great for users of that app, not so great for the recipe authors depending on this model. This is also why RSS is dead. Both Twitter and Facebook had it before, but killed it. You don't want to give away your goods for free. It's easy to put this problem at the recipe bloggers or Facebook, but we're just as responsible for this. We don't want to pay for anything so it's ads. Then we avoid and block ads. We lack a payment culture.
      - pmoriarty 5y ago
        Unsolicited advertising should be made illegal. Then there'd be no reason to optimize the web to serve up ads, because legally you couldn't. The world needs to switch away from advertising for the good of humanity.
        fleddr 5y ago
        Hey, fine with me. But do come up with an alternative monetization strategy.
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "In an ideal world no browser would need a reader mode, because pages themselves would be reader-friendly by design." This would happen if page authors just participated fully in the Semantic Web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
  - schroeding 5y ago
    "sometimes known as Web 3.0" :( The future we could have had, but did not get
    - JohnTHaller 5y ago
      But now we're getting Web3 instead, with blackjack and blockchains.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
WaxProlix 5y ago
A reader mode's job isn't to be 'complete' in some sense. You have addons to do anything you want to pages, or you can just run your own js on any given page. Reader mode is a reasonable low-overhead script-stripper that mostly does its job. My expectations aren't high, but it always delivers.
- aimor 5y ago
  "You have addons to do anything you want to pages" Except not on Firefox Mobile. This has been the most frustrating regression I've experienced, suddenly losing my favorite things about Firefox.
  - classichasclass 5y ago
    And there's no reliable way on Firefox Mobile to force reader view, either. This was possible on earlier versions with the about:reader?url= hack but not any longer.
asiachick 5y ago
> But some pages will always attempt to frustrate reader modes. So STOP READING THOSE PAGES!!! the reason the pages are full of ads is because people keep reading them.
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  I agree, but I'm a researcher, and while I don't read those pages I still need to get the content out in some cases [1]. [1] Meaning I've spent in the ballpark of five figures in power bill extracting content from html. Not my personal money, of course.
- randomsearch 5y ago
  The opposite could be true: the fewer people reading, the more additional adverts needed to maintain the page.
- ikurei 5y ago
  I don't read the internet just to enjoy the wonders of efficient, plain web design. I'm not gonna stop reading the newspapers or blogs I consider most trustworthy (or less bad) just because I don't like their design choices!
betwixthewires 5y ago
I have a rudimentary always on reader mode: I turn off CSS and JS by default. Once I scroll past what would be the billion custom button gifs and menu items I'm left with beautiful, clean text. I turn the stuff on on a per site basis when I want to use an actual web app, something like github, and every now and then I get an article that wants to fight me on it and my usual response is "well I guess you don't want to influence me with your words bad enough" and I back out. But it works 99% of the time exactly how I expect it to.
- ectopod 5y ago
  Me too. If I could change one thing about modern web dev, I would make the default size for SVG icons something like 32x32 pixels. Many sites use massive icons more like 1000 pixels wide. Also, animated grey backgrounds in placeholders are obnoxious.
phgn 5y ago
Another approach to completeness could be to remove noise from the original page instead of parsing just the text from it. In the worst case the page isn't changed at all but it's still usable (like when ad blockers miss some ads). [0] I assume you only want always-on reader mode for articles -- and detecting what's an article is another NLP problem. Yet both the completeness and article detection can probably be solved through heuristics in 90% of cases (the evidence is that we DO use reader modes). Maybe it depends on how much the last 10% frustrate you. [0] I'm working on a browser extension that does this: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter
hiccuphippo 5y ago
I guess AMP was the closest we'll get to an always-on reader mode. Not sure how popular it is but at my workplace there's plans to deprecate our AMP support. I'd really like a desktop browser to take advantage of it.
bmn__ 5y ago
> what if I always want reader mode? This is technologically complete impossible and all the solutions are a band-aid. Sigh… welcome to Opera versions 9 to 12. Not only did this complete technological impossibility exist, it did so over a decade ago. Tools → Preferences… (ctrl+f12) → Advanced → Content → Style Options… → Presentation Modes → Default mode [User mode]
- notriddle 5y ago
  The problem is that running in this mode can cause some web pages to break by default. Firefox doesn't even show the reader mode button unless its heuristics think it will work. Sometimes, when I put something in Pocket, it gives me a one-sentence abstract, but hides the entire rest of the article. Why do you think Opera got rid of it?
  - bmn__ 5y ago
    > Why do you think Opera got rid of it? http://enwp.org/Opera_(web_browser)#History http://enwp.org/Opera_(web_browser)#History Opera A.S. threw the whole browser with its countless innovations and usability affordances away. The next major version after 12 was a Chromium derivative.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      This was one of the sadder things to happen to internet technology. Opera used to be miles ahead of the other browsers, and they threw it all away. Yet another example of "worse is better".
weaksauce 5y ago
one thing that i saw on hn a while ago was a bookmarklette to remove all the junk from the page... quite useful and i use it daily typically. basically just removes any stickied or fixed positioned junk. surprisingly effective. javascript:( function(){ let i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if(getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'sticky') { elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]); } } document.body.style.overflow = "auto"; document.body.style.position = "static"; })() that's the bookmarklette i can gist it if someone wants a nicely formatted version but either way it works.

classichasclass 5y ago

I specifically wrote always-available, "sticky" (default: stays Reader View even if you go to another page) and automatic (goes auto on subpages or entire domains, as you specify) Reader View support built-in to TenFourFox to help out on slower systems.

paxys 5y ago

It's a mess by design. In an ideal world no browser would need a reader mode, because pages themselves would be reader-friendly by design. Page authors, of course, are instead more interested in optimizing for advertising and tracking. Reader mode, much like adblock extensions, works directly against their interests. In fact we wouldn't even need any new web standards to implement something like this. Any website following the latest Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and using the correct page structure and aria- tags should be fully semantically parsable and displayable in any format or medium.

Moru 5y ago
I'm sure they can live without my views. If I can't read the page I can always press the back button. I'm not going to buy anything from any ads anyway so no loss on either side except a few seconds of time lost for me. Just got a link to a documentation for an API that I can't read because of too low contrast. Dark Reader plugin nicely fixed it so didn't even have to try reader mode. It sucks to get old anyway, you young people don't have to make it worse. You will be in the same seat in 20-odd years so plan for it :-)
- pmoriarty 5y ago
  "I'm not going to buy anything from any ads anyway" The purpose of ads is often to get you to just recognize the brand (and/or associate positive feelings with it) so that if you are ever in the market for their products you'll be more likely to choose their brand over a "no-name brand" (ie. one that you haven't seen ads for). So you might think you're immune to advertising, but you probably aren't.
  - Seirdy 5y ago
    I offset these impacts by actively avoiding brands I recognize from unsolicited ads, and I encourage everyone to do the same.
  - Moru 5y ago
    Yes, That's why I use adblockers everywhere but that sometimes breaks the page and then I press the back button.
BFLpL0QNek 5y ago
There was a lot of stuff/buzz around the semantic web in the early 2000s. I’ve been out of web for a long time but it seems to of mostly died with the advent of React and the single page web application. Now it looks like everyone apart from public government sites with strict accessibility requirements just don’t bother putting the effort in.
- phgn 5y ago
  I think SEO is a large reason why popular sites do bother with semantic tagging.
  - fleddr 5y ago
    True, but at the same time there's an incentive against making semantics too good. The separation of data from presentation competes with the need/desire to monetize. For example, somebody had build an app that scrapes free recipes from the web, so that it's shown without ads and the ridiculous fluffy lectures that are typically part of it. Great for users of that app, not so great for the recipe authors depending on this model. This is also why RSS is dead. Both Twitter and Facebook had it before, but killed it. You don't want to give away your goods for free. It's easy to put this problem at the recipe bloggers or Facebook, but we're just as responsible for this. We don't want to pay for anything so it's ads. Then we avoid and block ads. We lack a payment culture.
    - pmoriarty 5y ago
      Unsolicited advertising should be made illegal. Then there'd be no reason to optimize the web to serve up ads, because legally you couldn't. The world needs to switch away from advertising for the good of humanity.
      - fleddr 5y ago
        Hey, fine with me. But do come up with an alternative monetization strategy.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"In an ideal world no browser would need a reader mode, because pages themselves would be reader-friendly by design." This would happen if page authors just participated fully in the Semantic Web. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
- schroeding 5y ago
  "sometimes known as Web 3.0" :( The future we could have had, but did not get
  - JohnTHaller 5y ago
    But now we're getting Web3 instead, with blackjack and blockchains.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

WaxProlix 5y ago

A reader mode's job isn't to be 'complete' in some sense. You have addons to do anything you want to pages, or you can just run your own js on any given page. Reader mode is a reasonable low-overhead script-stripper that mostly does its job. My expectations aren't high, but it always delivers.

aimor 5y ago
"You have addons to do anything you want to pages" Except not on Firefox Mobile. This has been the most frustrating regression I've experienced, suddenly losing my favorite things about Firefox.
- classichasclass 5y ago
  And there's no reliable way on Firefox Mobile to force reader view, either. This was possible on earlier versions with the about:reader?url= hack but not any longer.

asiachick 5y ago

> But some pages will always attempt to frustrate reader modes. So STOP READING THOSE PAGES!!! the reason the pages are full of ads is because people keep reading them.

uniqueuid 5y ago
I agree, but I'm a researcher, and while I don't read those pages I still need to get the content out in some cases [1]. [1] Meaning I've spent in the ballpark of five figures in power bill extracting content from html. Not my personal money, of course.
randomsearch 5y ago
The opposite could be true: the fewer people reading, the more additional adverts needed to maintain the page.
ikurei 5y ago
I don't read the internet just to enjoy the wonders of efficient, plain web design. I'm not gonna stop reading the newspapers or blogs I consider most trustworthy (or less bad) just because I don't like their design choices!

betwixthewires 5y ago

I have a rudimentary always on reader mode: I turn off CSS and JS by default. Once I scroll past what would be the billion custom button gifs and menu items I'm left with beautiful, clean text. I turn the stuff on on a per site basis when I want to use an actual web app, something like github, and every now and then I get an article that wants to fight me on it and my usual response is "well I guess you don't want to influence me with your words bad enough" and I back out. But it works 99% of the time exactly how I expect it to.

ectopod 5y ago
Me too. If I could change one thing about modern web dev, I would make the default size for SVG icons something like 32x32 pixels. Many sites use massive icons more like 1000 pixels wide. Also, animated grey backgrounds in placeholders are obnoxious.

phgn 5y ago

Another approach to completeness could be to remove noise from the original page instead of parsing just the text from it. In the worst case the page isn't changed at all but it's still usable (like when ad blockers miss some ads). [0] I assume you only want always-on reader mode for articles -- and detecting what's an article is another NLP problem. Yet both the completeness and article detection can probably be solved through heuristics in 90% of cases (the evidence is that we DO use reader modes). Maybe it depends on how much the last 10% frustrate you. [0] I'm working on a browser extension that does this: https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter https://github.com/lindylearn/unclutter

hiccuphippo 5y ago

I guess AMP was the closest we'll get to an always-on reader mode. Not sure how popular it is but at my workplace there's plans to deprecate our AMP support. I'd really like a desktop browser to take advantage of it.

bmn__ 5y ago

> what if I always want reader mode? This is technologically complete impossible and all the solutions are a band-aid. Sigh… welcome to Opera versions 9 to 12. Not only did this complete technological impossibility exist, it did so over a decade ago. Tools → Preferences… (ctrl+f12) → Advanced → Content → Style Options… → Presentation Modes → Default mode [User mode]

notriddle 5y ago
The problem is that running in this mode can cause some web pages to break by default. Firefox doesn't even show the reader mode button unless its heuristics think it will work. Sometimes, when I put something in Pocket, it gives me a one-sentence abstract, but hides the entire rest of the article. Why do you think Opera got rid of it?
- bmn__ 5y ago
  > Why do you think Opera got rid of it? http://enwp.org/Opera_(web_browser)#History http://enwp.org/Opera_(web_browser)#History Opera A.S. threw the whole browser with its countless innovations and usability affordances away. The next major version after 12 was a Chromium derivative.
  - pmoriarty 5y ago
    This was one of the sadder things to happen to internet technology. Opera used to be miles ahead of the other browsers, and they threw it all away. Yet another example of "worse is better".

weaksauce 5y ago

one thing that i saw on hn a while ago was a bookmarklette to remove all the junk from the page... quite useful and i use it daily typically. basically just removes any stickied or fixed positioned junk. surprisingly effective. javascript:( function(){ let i, elements = document.querySelectorAll('body *'); for (i = 0; i < elements.length; i++) { if(getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'fixed' || getComputedStyle(elements[i]).position === 'sticky') { elements[i].parentNode.removeChild(elements[i]); } } document.body.style.overflow = "auto"; document.body.style.position = "static"; })() that's the bookmarklette i can gist it if someone wants a nicely formatted version but either way it works.