"Readability is far more than an ad blocker. It addresses multiple unpleasant trends in Web layout these days: type getting too small, layouts getting cluttered and complex, text overlapping with graphics, ads interrupting the flow of the prose, and so on. (You can print or e-mail the cleaned-up page, too.)"
At first try, it seems awesome, look at those two screenshots below!
(And I can add that the first screenshot is how my browser looks even with a pretty good ad-blocker installed.)
Before clicking on the "Readability" button:
After clicking on the "Readability" button:
(I just wish it had a bit finer settings of text size etc. I'd like something just in the middle between the "medium" and "large" text settings myself.)
Update: anon tips us to a more flexible variety: Readable the app. I recommend keeping both, some sites work better with one, some with the other.
... And actually this seems like a very good solution to what I blogged about a few months back: how to isolate text on the screen for reading. (At least for the web.)
It's also great for two of my pet peeves: white text on black backgrounds, and too-small text (on way too many sites, I think it's a majority actually). (I know it can be adjusted, but it's a pain doing that all the time, and it often throws the layout out of whack, something which happens too often if I set the base text size too large in the browser settings. Sigh.)
10 comments:
Lifehacker covered Readability back in early March, then in early April they followed up with Readable the App, so you can steal a march on Pogue while he is still busy filtering the flow for content:
http://bit.ly/1RN3p2
Thanks, man, that rocks.
... or you might try the Firefox Add-on "TidyRead"
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11653.
(I have not yet.)
Readability is brilliant. I do a lot of ready and often want to print the text for later reading and sharing with others.
Previously I had resorted to copy and paste into a blank document, but that was very time consuming!
Thanks for the tip.
Have looked at the other options your readers have suggested and what I most like about the first one is its simplicity!
"Previously I had resorted to copy and paste into a blank document, but that was very time consuming!"
Yes indeed. I did that too sometimes!
"Have looked at the other options your readers have suggested and what I most like about the first one is its simplicity!"
I agree. But if only it offered the text size I want! (I think only offering the rough steps it does is overdoing simplicity a little.)
If the result has a too small text size, why not simply magnifying (or reducing) additionally within the browser?
correction:
... a too small text size ... =>
... a too small (or too big) text size ...
It's true I can do that, but it (just slightly) defeats the purpose of the wonderful simplicity of the feature.
Font size 18 in the Readable App fits me well.
That's true.
BTW on newspaper online articles (at least some German newspapers) there is often a button "print" which gives a similar result of text only, also the links listed as text on the bottom.
Yeah, WTF is THAT about, with the type size? I use 800x600 for my screen, and still, more and more often these days I can't read the damn things. It feels just as if they're getting cheap on paper space to cram more ads.
I also greatly resent it that most news articles these days take forever to finish opening, ALSO because they have maybe 1 megabyte total of complicated iframe ads, for a 50K quantity of text. Every iframe can potentially amount to embedding an entire new web page of any possible size...
And they dare tell us how "spam wastes energy worldwide"!
Okay, that's not entirely false. Some are even wasting energy spamming my marginal blog now. I don't know if I should feel annoyance or pity.
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