Reader View in Firefox

Reader View: A Firefox Feature for a Cleaner Web Page

Reader View Strips Out Everything But the Content
It Also Can Read the Content Aloud to You

In the early days of the World Wide Web, browsers did not support a lot of fancy stuff.  Animated GIFs and Blinking Text were about the most sophisticated design elements available. But as the web matured and browser technology advanced, the average web browser was able to support a whole slew of features. Not only did we start seeing multi-columned web pages, we started seeing pop-ups, ads, and a lot of clutter.  This is fine on a lot of web sites, but sometimes we just want to read the main content, without a lot of distracting elements.  Sometimes, we yearn for the early days of the web, when information was presented cleanly, and in a decent sized font.  Reader view is here to help a user achieve that look.

What is Reader View?

Reader view, also referred to as Reader Mode, is a feature that strips away all extraneous content, leaving you with just the "guts" of the page.  It strips away things like menus, buttons, ads and background images, leaving you with just the main content. It also changes the page's text size, contrast and layout for better readability.

To demonstrate, I zoomed our last post to 50% in both "regular" and "reader" modes. Then I took screenshots.

Here it is in "regular" mode:

Quick Tip: Quickly Adjust Text Size

No More Squinting! 

Learn How to Adjust the Size of Text on a Web Page Using
CRTL+ and CTRL-

Web-based documents are great for those of us with non-perfect vision.  No longer do we need to squint at tiny text.  One of the most powerful aspects of electronic documents is the ability to adjust them, so that they best work for you.  Graphics-folks may love fitting a lot of stuff on to one screen, but I prefer NOT having to reach for the reading glasses.  Fortunately, there is a VERY EASY trick to bump text size up or down, with a single key combination.