Apple pushed out Safari 5 earlier today. With it came a new feature called ‘Reader’ that, in the words of Apple themselves,: –
“…removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you’re on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article – whether two or twenty. “
Now that sounds good to me. Sadly the feature refused to work when we tried Safari 5 out via Wine earlier today but the ‘that sounds good to me’ factor stayed with me; Just how could I get this functionality in Chrome or Firefox?
Easily it turns out. I literally spent about 3 minutes searching before I had the following extensions installed and running.
Readability Redux for Chrome/ium
Readability Extension for Firefox
Annoyingly the Chrome plug-in removes images too, which the Reader feature in Safari doesn’t but it remains a great way to read articles without any visual framing or distractions.