Show HN: Increase your readability and productivity with this simple extension

This functionality has been baked in Firefox for a long time and I use it quite often. Not only makes the ads and other clutter disappear, but it also removes most of the "disable your adblock" unclosable popups.

It is definitely one of the super-nice things to have baked in straight in the browser, and probably one of the major differences I see between Chrome and Firefox in day-to-day usage. I just wish that somehow it was persistent for certain rules, but I can see how that is a slippery slope.

Chrome has had a builtin DOM distiller for a while (not sure if still guarded by an experimental flag, on my phone now so can’t check), but it’s primitive and worst of all reloads the page on exit.

Not only the readability mode of Firefox is awesome, but they've also opensourced it separately, in case you feel you can submit a PR for a persistence of some kind or create your own extension that makes use of it.

https://github.com/mozilla/readability

I use it profusely along with Puppeteer in Node and it's an awesome building block for web scraping!

I can confirm that it's still loaded by an experimental flag. As a word of warning to anyone who wants to try it: the design isn't suited for reading at length (120 character line width, set in Courier). It's really not that great.

Firefox and Safari have decent reading modes, though.

It's also a lifesaver for viewing pages that are not mobile friendly. It's my most-loved feature of Firefox.

> 120 character line width, set in Courier

Um, it’s not? Chrome 78 on macOS here, text is rendered in 14px Roboto, content box width is 75% (on 2560px viewport). I find it fairly pleasant to read, my only problem is page reloading on exit as I already mentioned.

Edit: The mode is gone after updating to 79, seems to be gated by a command line switch now. What the hell.

I don't see this feature in firefox. If the Firfox team put effort into the ui and feature discoverability it would make it much simpler for a chrome user to switch.

Ah, I stand corrected. The content box width is indeed based on the viewport size. My text, however, is still rendered in 14px Courier on macOS (and even given a .monospace class), so I'm not sure what's going on there.

I just updated to Chrome 79 and now the distilled mode is gone. For anyone who's looking on how to re-enable it, here's a thread: https://support.google.com/chrome/thread/22576539

It's visible only in article-like pages and it looks like a document icon in the navbar.

In Firefox for Android is the only non-essential icon in the navbar (besides the tabs and more settings) for articles. On desktop it shows at the right on the search/url box.