Hacker News Reader

Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

On Safari and Firefox we have a built-in way to remove distractions like these, such as Reader mode. A cynical viewpoint on why Chrome doesn’t offer this is that doing this would prevent you from seeing Google’s ads.

View on HN

Don't think any cynicism at all is required to arrive at this conclusion.

I marvel at the creative genius that can come up with a, with any plausible alternative explanation, to be honest.

“At Google, we love the internet and creators who dedicate their life to crafting webpages that are beautiful to look at and delightful to read. In order to honor the hard work of these creatives, we have decided to not implement the “reader mode” many other browsers have. You can rest assured that Google will always do everything it can to support the visions of all who make the internet as we love it possible.”

(Could also insert a sentence or two about how Google has AMP instead, leaving “creators” in control unlike “reader modes”)

It's sad how plausible this is. Particularly in light of how Google explained removing the "view image" button from Google images the other day:

"Today we're launching some changes on Google Images to help connect users and useful websites."[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/searchliaison/status/964226180776845312

Two tweets down they mention they did it because of a lawsuit settlement.

They added that more truthful explanation a few hours later, due to the barrage of hate and confusion their original tweet was getting.

Ya lying to people smart enough to see through bullshit does that

I know these aren't your words but man what a crock.

The user and their browser can change about every aspect of the presentation by design including showing nothing at all to sight impaired users and just reading out loud. It's so blatantly obviously about ads that I don't know why they bother to mislead. Just admit you the user will always be second priority and that if you have to choose between making money and making the best anything they will always by financial position be obligated to choose option a.

I'm pretty sure this is actually written by GuiA and not coming from Google itself.

"Bow toward your sitebuilding masters."

> I marvel at the creative genius that can come up with a, with any plausible alternative explanation, to be honest.

"We didn't deem it as high priority as 600 other things we think we should do in this free browser."

Just add the Mercury Reader extension. Done. Sure, a native feature would be better than a plugin. But I'm not holding my breath.

Just Read is a nice Chrome extension that provides this functionality

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/just-read/dgmanlpm...

Reader mode exists on Chrome for Android, so this is most likely a feature that mainline Chrome hasn't gotten around to rather than some nefarious plan :)

Safari 5 introduced Reader. It damn near predates Chrome itself.

I think Google would have gotten around to it by now if they were going to, considering the other giant epics they’ve launched in the browser since then.

Chrome on Android seems to have a reader mode. They don't call it that, it's called "simplified page" or something like that, but it's basically the same thing as FF and safari's reader mode.

And they even prompt to use it, which isn't something I've seen Firefox do.

Try this chrome flag to enable reader mode option:

chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics

I don't see this flag on my version of Chrome (64.0 on Mac). Are you on the beta branch?

I see it on Brave and Chrome for Android, versions 64.x

Maybe it's only for mobile?

Yes, apparently it's mobile-only.

As much as I love reader mode, with this and the various other work arounds in this thread are we actually enabling them to make bad UI's? Avoiding sites like this might be a much better solution in the long term.

Medium is on my mental block list, when I do accidentally click a link to that site my immediate response is to click the back button... That is how bad the ux medium has gone out of their way to create

For articles I can live with it but the comments layout was clearly made to discourage any conversation.

The past has shown that cynicism is realistic when discussing whether ads or altruism are the motivation of google.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com