Hacker News Reader

Comment by AndrewWarner | Hacker News Reader

If you’re in iOS, UC is a great way to pop out videos so you can, for example, watch a YouTube video while reading Hacker News.

It also enables you to listen to just about any video in the background, when you switch to other apps.

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Firefox for Android does background playback too, and even provides media controls (exposing play/pause etc through the standard system API). Some sites may need the Video Background Play Fix [0] add-on.

For popping out YouTube videos I use NewPipe, a FOSS Android YouTube client [1].

[0] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-backgro...

[1] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.schabi.newpipe/

Interesting. I've only ever tried YouTube but on my Oneplus, as soon as Firefox loses focus, playback stops.

YouTube should work with the add-on I linked installed.

You can also enlarge the default font size similar to desktop browser. Can not do that on Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Reading this site on UC is much easier on my eyes.

This text reflow feature is key to my choosing a mobile browser. I use Opera mainly for this reason.

Text reflow used to be standard. Does anyone know why Chrome and Firefox removed it?

Text reflow is a "must have".

There's the Fit Text to Width add-on for Firefox:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/android/addon/fit-text-to-w...

The Accessibility section in the Firefox for Android settings also contains options for adapting pages to the system font size and overriding zoom-blocking. And there's the built-in Reader View which extracts and represents the text from supported pages.

Fit Text seems to work, thanks!

Sounds handy! Can anyone speak to how it treats privacy?

A quick search does not inspire optimism:

https://citizenlab.ca/2015/05/a-chatty-squirrel-privacy-and-...

Privacy? On low-end smartphones with some trojan factory preinstalled?

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/prein...

I don’t use it for anything that requires login

Firefox does the same thing

how does it get around apple's policy of not allowing another browser engine in the OS?

It probably doesn't right? Also these devices are probably not iOS devices we are talking about but Android devices.

iOS definitely allows you to implement your own browser engine. The only caveat is that Apple doesn’t let third-party apps to mmap executable memory, so you won’t be able to create a JITting JS engine.

Apps that browse the web must use the iOS WebKit framework and WebKit Javascript.

Section 2.5.6 from https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/

Hm, you're right, I concede.

> watch a YouTube video while reading Hacker News.

The YouTube app also does that (although possibly only if you have YouTube Red?)

Correct, only if you have YouTube Red, which is almost exclusively available in the US.

The YouTube app also has ads, which makes it a non-starter.

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