Hacker News Reader

Comment by Telemakhos | Hacker News Reader

Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage reader mode on websites you specify, when it detects an article.

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Firefox has this too, it's useful. However I only find that I use it for websites that have shit CSS that makes it hard to read on mobile. For everything else AdBlock Plus works fine.

Firefox reader mode can often strip out JS annoyances.

Doesn't reader mode disable JS by definition?

iirc I can use Firefox's reader mode on websites that if I simply disabled js entirely would refuse to load anything at all. The viewer itself might have minimal or no js but it's not quite the same.

ABP works for the most common of these too (e.g. popups/banners)! You have to enable it in the settings I think.

JS annoyances it won't fix are like idiotic scrolling behaviour and stuff. And for that, yeah reader mode is ideal.

Seconding this. Incredibly useful feature, especially on sites who's JavaScript is constantly jerking the DOM and/or scroller around. So fucking annoying.

It's frankly wild how many of my favorite tools for Internet browsing have nothing to do with connectivity, solving bugs, or any of that and it's just stripping out all the fucking BULLSHIT that comes on a modern website.

It's a shame it's almost illegal. If you make a website that proxies content to another website but not ads, you go to jail. Reader mode only survives because it's client-side and fairly generic.

Under what law would one be charged?

IANAL but I'd guess copyright infringion: unauthorized (re)distribution of copyrighted content.

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