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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode.

"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.

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I want a reader mode that renders the page as if it were in an extremely tall window (ie. 10+ screens tall), then gives me a scrollable view of that static image of the rendered page. My browser should lie to the page on my behalf, and make it behave as if everything were already on-screen.

Materialistic[0] effectively does this (minus the screenshot part), not intentional I think (I belive it makes the webview as tall as the requested page and then uses the OS native scroll widget to add a scrollbar for it). The problem I regularly encounter with this is sites that have a vertically centered popup (cookie banner, newsletter, etc.), with a backdrop that obscures the whole page. You first have to scroll down quite a bit (half the size of the article) to be able to click the popup away.

[0]:https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic

the reason "reader mode" isn't the default is to discourage website authors from intentionally breaking reader mode

-_-

This. It's fundamentally a social problem. The moment that reader mode becomes the default, they'll start gradually extending it with "useful" additions until it's just as bloated and painful again, and then we'll have some rebrand of the concept of reader mode, and the cycle starts anew.

"Why can't we have a functional version of the site for the blind, and the normal one for everyone else?"

'We have that! It's called HTML!"

Edit: Earlier version of this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961

Presumably, if reader mode is to never allow any website-programmable interactivity ever (as I would expect), it would be much harder to do, though.

Sure, but that's a big if: "Oh, just this one small thing for interactivity would be nice ... and this other thing ..." just like with how the early web expanded functionality.

s/discourage/avoid encouraging/ but yes.

On MacOS and iOS you can set reader mode as default. You should set reader mode as default.

what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed

Why just a few seconds? In reader mode you can press escape any time to close it.

"should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something."

Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.

Big Sur made me take back every Fischer Price comment I ever made about Windows XP. I didn't think it was possible to make a more childish UI than Aqua, but here we are.

Hey, at least we're finally spared the infantile "MY this" and "MY that" nonsense that dominated the early 2000s.

I like that Apple was trying somwthing that has a little more texture and soul to it, but Liquid glass needs a lot of work to be made more subtle and usable. 10 out of 10 idea, 3 out of 10 execution.

I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10

It's just a bunch of text and maybe some horizontal lines. It manages to take "flat" design and make it even worse.

The list of regressions is seemingly endless. Where are the menus? Oh... scattered all over each application's UI, behind multiple hamburger buttons. What application does this window belong to? Who knows, since the title bar is missing.

And WTF is up with the abandonment of the File dialog? Now, every application presents a crude, inscrutable text-based form with no context showing WHERE you're putting anything.

No offense, but it's incompetent garbage.

Oh yeah the UX is absolute doodoo but I think the design system itself looks nice

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