Reader For Chrome On Mac

The Safari 5 feature that's caught the web's attention is the Reader button, which strips down articles and blog posts into an ad-free, highly readable format. Two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome do a good job of recreating that convenience.

Chrome on Mac or Windows Chrome and Acrobat are no longer compatible. For more information, see Change in support for Acrobat and Reader plug-ins in modern web browsers. If you’re using Chrome for mobile, you can navigate to your flags, where an ‘Enable Reader Mode’ option exists. Turn that on, and you’ll find a new icon in your toolbar, which strips the.

If you missed our round-up of what's new in Safari 5, the short explanation of Reader is that, while many bookmarklets have come along to offer a simplified, less-cluttered reading experience, Safari is the first major browser to go ahead and offer that kind of feature by default, as an address bar button. If you're a fan of bookmarklets, and your bookmarks aren't too cluttered to lose them in, we recommend the tools from arc90's Readability, the Instapaper Text bookmarklet, and the Readable app for highly customized formatting.

First Look at What's New in Safari 5

Windows/Mac: Apple's new Safari 5 browser isn't quite an adventurous leap forward, but it …

Read

But maybe you want your Firefox or Chrome rig to offer that kind of button-click functionality. You're in luck. First off, here's the Top 10 feature we'll try our reading tools out on—click the image for a larger view:

Now here are two add-ons for Firefox and Chrome, and a look at how they do at getting all minimalist with the text and pics. Click any of the images below, too, for a larger view

Readability (Firefox)

Baris Derin rolled the Readability bookmarklet into a full-fledged add-on for Firefox, but also added in a pretty neat auto-scrolling feature for the true lean-back-and-read experience. Readability tends to keep more of the text and formatting in and around the page, but strips out all the marketing and navigation material. It places an 'R' button in the lower-right status area of Firefox, which isn't the most convenient spot for our use, but some may prefer having it hidden away until needed. Notice the transparent icons, too, that provide printing, email, and refresh functions for live-updating posts.

iReader (Chrome)

Mhd Hejazi's iReader is directly inspired by Safari's Reader function, offering the same kind of pop-out white box that darkens the rest of the page, a button right in the address bar, and very, very minimal decoration—as you can see, it pared down our Top 10 feature quite a bit. There are also keyboard shortcuts for Windows and Mac to activate iReader, and options to change the background opacity, font and formatting, and add a 'Send with Gmail' link to your articles. Neat stuff.

Both add-ons are free downloads. Know of another reading/simplifying extension that gets the job done? Tell us about it in the comments. Thanks to emmikkelsen for the inspiration!

Chromecast Extension For Chrome On Mac

Ie Extension For Chrome On Mac

Readability [Add-ons for Firefox]
iReader [Google Chrome extension gallery]

Comments are closed.