The Web has become a very rude place. We’re trying to mind our own business but we’re bombarded more and more with noise that makes it harder to focus and read. It’s become a painful experience. Just visit MSNBC or Yahoo News and you’ll quickly find yourself waist-deep in all sorts of advertising clutter.
Well, we decided to do something about it. Readability is a browser bookmarklet that takes a crack at wiping out all that junk so you can have a more enjoyable reading experience. It works with all the latest browsers and its success rate is pretty respectable (we’d guess over 90% of web sites are handled properly).
It’s our latest lab experiment and a small gesture towards a more peaceful, civilized Internet!
Yann Esposito said:
Hi, I tried it on many site, the idea is great! Thanks!
My only remark, is it don’t work on my website done with iWeb.
Ami Ohayon said:
Fantastic tool; thank you.
One question … how can I back out of Readability? For instance, on this NYTimes page the “Next Page” link doesn’t show up in Readibility:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/science/03angi.html?8dpc
How can I return to the original view in order to turn the page? Could some sort of toggle be added that would let the reader switch between the regular view and Readability?
Again, marvelous tool … it’s an immediate must-have.
lar said:
One other suggestion: provide the option to turn off images (or just images over a certain dimension) when making the page more readable.
It works great, though. Thanks.
Tim Kadlec said:
Excellent idea! It makes such a difference when I can just focus on the content I actually want to read.
One question/suggestion: currently, your script looks for the section with the most paragraph tags, and assumes that is the section to hang onto. That works fine, but I can see some cases (particularly code-related posts which may feature a lot of ul’s or ol’s) where perhaps that may not be entirely accurate.
How about checking first to see if an article is posted in hAtom format? If you can locate a div with the class ‘.hentry’ you use that content, otherwise you can go through and determine which area has the most paragraphs.
A real quick example of how this could work is at: http://www.timkadlec.com/readable.js. You can see the changes starting at line 42. While this wouldn’t fix all the remaining 10%, it could certainly help to close the gap a bit.
Either way, fantastic work on an incredibly useful tool!
Adam said:
Cool tool, but I second the need for a way to back up. There should be a “return to original” link at the bottom. Right now, if you hit the back button, you end up at the referring page.
On a much more minor note, this tool almost works with the recipes at Epicurious! Unfortunately, though, it lops off the ingredients list.
Joel Potischman said:
A “Restore Original” button on the bottom would be handy, but if you hit Reload/Refresh in your browser that seems to restore the original version of the page.
Gary Homewood said:
Marvellous. Until now, if I find something worth reading, I usually try the print preview and then switch to full screen, to hide all the browser chrome. What’d be nice is your bookmarklet plus something to hide all the chrome, without having to go full screen. Then I could really concentrate…
T. Irons said:
Excellent! There are several sites where it didn’t work, but I hope you continue development. It’s better than aspirin!
Wikzo said:
A great idea – and it works for most sites. I was wondering if you could consider to make an extension to, let’s say, Firefox rather than a bookmarklet. Then it would be possible to change a lot of options and going from normal to easy read to normal again.
Keep up the good work.
Simon said:
This is a great idea, and the pages look nice, one feature I would love to have would be the option for the bookmarklet to grab the ‘print’ or ‘single pages’ version of an article that many sites have, that would also obviate the call for navigation buttons. Thanks a lot.
JackF1946 said:
Tremendous, tremendous utility! While I’m not sure which of the technical issues cited above may be involved, Readability will not allow me special access to the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7921430.stm
In any event, “Thank You.” Imagine…no more screwing around trying to tweak the text and page sizes for ten minutes before I can read something on different pages. I have three bookmarklets set for News-Large, Terminal-Medium, and Novel…it’s as easy as that!
tof said:
Very useful. How about some additional font and color choices?
michael said:
And thus begins the new arms race… it is easy for site owners to render this wonderful tool mute…
All they need to do is check specifically for CSS loaded from your domain (or even better maintain their own list of acceptable domains) and if that happens then reload the page.
Then you’ll tweak your code to get around this, and then they’ll tweak their code to get around that and so on and so on…
You can find version 0.1 of such code here:
http://ifelse.org/projects/misc/break_readability.txt
(Note: This was done as an exercise on my lunch break to demonstrate a point. I’m a new fan of Readability)
Christopher Fahey said:
I love this and I am evangelizing it.
Wish list? Well, this is probably an obscure use case, but here goes: I like to drag web pages I am researching into a program called Scrivener, which bundles the page up as a Safari webarchive for offline viewing. But this doesn’t work with Readability pages because the webarchive saves the *real* page, not the Readability-altered view of the page.
It would work, though, if the new view of the page was, in fact, a new page — if the bookmarklet actually went to a new URL that could be saved with the new view.
I’ve not thought this through — if it means that you have to host the new page, then you’re risking copyright infringement. But maybe there’s another clever way? This would help the people above who’ve not figured out that the back button isn’t the “restore” tool (the refresh button is).
Anyway, awesome work.
W said:
Excellent tool!
One suggestion: reset the scroll to the top of the window after reformatting the page.
Sometimes I scroll down past the heading blocks to the content on a busy page. When I execute Readbility, the distance scrolled is no longer related to the format of the page, so some of the content is missed and I have to scroll back up.
W
M said:
Great idea, I want this so much.
Unfortuately, it does not work well with two sites I visit frequently, http://www.dn.se and http://www.aftonbladet.se.
Maybe you can check why it does not work. I use Safari 4
Great Prototype said:
This is a phenomenal tool, and I echo suggestions/comments from others, plus a couple of my own:
1) F5 (refresh) gets the page back to how it was, and this is very helpful.
2) Would prefer as Firefox extension that gives more options, and allows invoking by keystroke.
3) Noscript gets in the way – my solution was to drag a noscript “temporarily allow all this page” button next to the “Readability” button. So now I can first click the Noscript button, then the Readability button.
4) Would much prefer the result going to a new tab, in a way which allowed that tab to be copied or printed in the far superior reading format.
5) Can be used in combination with the Zorro utility for Windows, which means it is possible to remove ALL (or most – your choice) clutter from the screen except what you’re reading.
I have many more ideas, because I’ve been thinking about this exact issue over the past couple weeks. Will send an Email.
Ustice said:
I love the idea, but I would change the implementation of it a bit. When the Readability bookmarklet is pressed, the page fades to a muted version (33%), and when the user hovers the mouse over the page, that element that is under the mouse is highlighted (67%). When the item is clicked, it stays highlighted (100%).
At the top are simple instructions to select the items that should be shown, and to press a button when done.
I like the current attempt to find the right part of the page, but it is often inaccurate. Set that as the default selected elements, and remember user changes.
Dean Stevens said:
Readability is highly influenced by the spacing between lines of text — the “leading.” Longer lines require greater space, while shorter lines get away with less.
Based on this fact, I’d recommend having users specify a “column width” that defines line length consistently regardless of the window size. You can then choose a leading that is appropriate to the line length. Currently, only certain combinations of type size, column width, and window size are actually very readable.
If you’d like to get some feedback on your typographic choices, let me suggest posting some examples to the forums at http://typophile.com, where you’re bound to get some good perspective.
Nice work on the tool, by the way — it’s not quite “indistinguishable from magic” at this point, but its concept is well worth an improvement to the implementation!
SimpleLife said:
Wow. Awesome. Go the link from Daring Fireball.
Please make Verdana font available.
Amazing.
Thank you.
Ian Eure said:
Fails to work on The Macalope: http://www.macalope.com/2009/03/03/pinch-the-macalope/
Uses the sidebar instead of the blog post as the content it processes.
Isaac said:
This is a great tool. This is going to make my life a hell of a lot easier.
How about implementing phpBB support?
Cat Dancer said:
I find your choice of a gray background makes the page harder to read. Please include an option for a white background. Thank you!
Richard Ziade said:
Hi all -
Thanks for the great response! Yes – Readability does not work with all web pages. We’ll compile a list of pages that fail and see how we can tweak it.
If anyone is a JS superstar and wants to help out with the development of Readability, don’t hesitate to contact me:
rich@arc90.com
Thanks again.
Jonathan Lang said:
Unfortunately, one of the example sites you provide did not work for me: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29492354/
Readability gave me the sponsored links :)
Adi said:
It’s great, but it’s a deal breaker that for those MSNBC pages that make you click to page two and three, you can’t get off of the first page because the link to the next pages is gone. I use it in Chrome.
syncopatedrhythm said:
Am I the only one who thinks this is wrong?
I work for a big news website, and we try to design our pages to offer our users fantastic content, plus links to other relevant stuff. We put advertising on those pages – ads that are very tightly regulated to avoid them being annoying, but of course they aim to be eye-catching, and I’d be the first to admit that some fail and are just plain ugly.
We put ads on pages so that we can make money to bring users more good content, and in doing so provide value and jobs for many people.
And you are creating products that ultimately might destroy our ability to do that.
The examples in your video are two great sites, not mine, but with similar business models
I’m sad that so many comments here are supportive of your venture, without any questioning of why it is valuable to rip value out of so many businesses that largely exist to bring edification and pleasure to so many. With a little profit on the side, of course.
Devon Whittle said:
This is great. Can anyone suggest a wordpress plugin to allow readers to automatically do this to a post without using the bookmarklet?
I’m thinking a plugin that adds a “print view” link to my posts, there are two on WordPress extend, but wondering if anyone knew which was best.
Yotam said:
It would be extra nice if Readability padded the bottom of the page with enough white space so that scrolling by page (as with the space bar) doesn’t do a partial-scroll, throwing off my eyes (which jump automatically to the top of the page) and forcing me to do a scan of the page for where the previous page ended.
Hans said:
This is brilliant, and I’ll be using it regularly. It neatly makes my web browser feel like my RSS reader, which is so much more comfortable.
But it seems a shame to strip all branding from the site. I’d love a small header with the page’s title and favicon (or apple-touch-icon) to retain a sense of place. Might be a good place for the “return to original” affordance being widely requested, too.
Great Prototype said:
syncopatedrhythm – I certainly understand the implications here of what stripping out ads does to ad-support content business models. However, I question whether the current grand experiment of ad supported content on the web is a sustainable model, for the following reasons:
1) There are people (like myself) whose work consists of essentially reading all day on the computer. By 2001 it had gotten hard to read long documents and it has only gotten worse since then. I would not be able to work today without the Adblock Plus Firefox extension, and lately I’ve become obsessed with finding other tools to eliminate distraction so I can get my work done (Zorro utility for windows, Hide All Toolbars experimental firefox extension, etc.)
2) There are people who put great content on the web without any expectation of immediate payment. It is sometimes a labor of love but more often it is some form of branding or feeder into something else that does make money, such as selling books or other media, becoming more respected in one’s field (and thus getting a better job), etc. Professional content providers such as yourself are in a position of competing with these people. Granted, most such content is garbage, but some if it is really good.
3) Some (usually older) people I know barely use the internet. They don’t know all the tricks for reducing distraction. Those rare times they do try to read news on a news site or something similar, they feel overwhelmed – and the only way to deal with it is by printing on a piece of paper.
4) It has become so hard to read anything longer than a few hundred words on the web, that it has changed the way people write and read. Conventional wisdom now strongly urges content writes to keep all posts to less than few hundred words, preferably with catchy headlines, lists, or some other gimmick to catch a person’s interest. If it becomes possible to read longer documents on the web, then there will naturally be an increase in the number of longer, well thought-out articles. It strikes me a dangerous experiment, the way the brains of young people are being rewired (by the technology and current usage patterns of the web) to only be able to read short articles and have a very limited attention span.
5) Some other business models are emerging for proprietary content providers. 2 examples are:
a) Combination of free and paid content – perhaps 20% of articles are free, but the rest you only get to read first few paragraphs unless you’ve paid the annual subscription.
b) Kindle paid subscriptions. This is small now, but the cost of Epaper dropping fast, so 2010 will probably be the year the market gets flooded with (sub $200?) Epaper readers from Sony, Amazon, FoxIt, etc. There is real value for the consumer in being able to read something easily, and these Ereaders may be the answer for people in your business.
My prediction is that 20 years from now, if not 10 years from now – the whole idea of banner-ad supported content on the web will be considered a failed experiment because it just made it too hard for people to read. You can already see the beginnings of it with what happened to search – all you see anymore is unobtrusive ad links while searching.
I do know it can be hard to adjust when industry conditions keep changing from under you – I’m experiencing it myself in my field currently – but it’s certainly easy to see why there’s a need to be able to focus and concentrate while reading – especially something long.
Rick said:
Works great, mostly. I wish there wasn’t such a large jump between the small and medium font sizes, though.
I did find one incompatible site, SFGate (home of the San Francisco Chronicle): http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/03/01/national/a102520S25.DTL&tsp=1
Paolo said:
I love it. “Print view” was my friend too, except you can’t find it on all pages.
Minor improvement: some web sites (e.g. NYT) split their articles in more than one page. Readability strips the “1, 2, … Next” links at the bottom, so there is no indication that there is more to follow. Now, if you only found a way to combine multiple pages articles into 1…
Gary Varner said:
Cool…but kills photos (expected) and ignores multiple page articles (as in, only shows the first page). For that last problem, I can’t count on this as a useful tool, but it is an exciting experiment if the kinks can be worked out.
RG said:
I echo the comments of syncopatedrhythm. While this certainly isn’t wrong in any sense of the word, technologies of this sort will certainly make the Web as a whole less useful. Here’s why:
- For all the techno-libertarian prattle, a lot of the news we care about comes from people who get paid to collect and report it. They frequently have to fly, and stay in hotels, and rent cars to do this. It’s a labor of love for some of them, but Hilton doesn’t take love for payment so cash has to come into play somewhere. We Internet users have spoken again and again that we will not pay for content on the Web. So if content is not paid and not ad-supported, it will inevitably go the third route of disappearance.
- What content does not disappear will end up in an arms race of the sort that copy protection experienced in the 80s. Anyone who lived through that understands that those on the side of circumventing legitimate business models contributed to making it impossible for the rest of us to back up our floppies. On the Internet, this might manifest itself as: this site is only viewable in trusted browsers (i.e. those that prevent Readability and its ilk).
- The prattle about how we’re all going to buy the content is again ridiculous, as proven in the Real World at Slate, Salon, the New York Times, the LA Times, The Wall Street Journal, etc. It’s not viable, no matter how much you want it to be. Besides, if they asked you to pony up, you wouldn’t pay either.
ryanl said:
Here is something quite similiar.
Redub Reader
Dan said:
Works great when it works, but doesn’t work well on a number of sites. Strips all content from AppleInsider, for example
Mandy Brown said:
In regard to ad revenue: it is a mistake for any content site to heed the needs of their advertisers at the expense of their customers. The advertising/content discussion up until now has occurred in the advertiser’s lap, with the assumption that consumers of content must bear any and all matter of obnoxious advertising as the price of said content. But this vision of the conflict fails to heed the effect that advertising has on the value of content: the more cluttered the content becomes, the less worth consuming it is, and so on, with the end game scenario looking very much like the one million dollar homepage: all ads, no content, and not much reason to visit once the gimmick is up. That’s a dead end for advertisers and consumers alike.
Instead, why not consider an environment that elevates the quality of the content (by publishing better writing, and designing it like you know it deserves to be read) AND better advertising. Surely the content producers of the world can develop better methods for delivering ads than the more/louder/uglier examples we struggle with today. And surely advertisers can be made to understand it is not the quantity or scale of the advertising, but the quality of the relationships they develop that matters.
I may be idealistic here, but I know this much is true: the other way, the path we’re on now, does not bode well for anyone. Editors and content strategists alike should take tools like Readability as a sign that their users want something from them: and where there is a sign of demand, there is a likely source of profit.
Great Prototype said:
I’m convinced that people are willing to pay for some kinds of content. It’s up to the content providers to experiment with their business models until they figure out how to do it. Hearst is certainly experimenting:
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/02/27/hearst-to-begin-charging-for-digital-news/
I suspect there will also be much experimentation with which kinds of content are worth paying for, which kind not. I don’t think people are ever going to pay again for regurgitation of yesterday’s news. A few examples of what people (including myself) pay for:
1) Very insightful analysis
2) Highly specialized news that is hard to come by
3) Ability to search archived material well
4) Beautifully formatted material (i.e. Kindle subscriptions, Value Line subscription, National Geographic, etc.).
I’m sure there are other things I haven’t thought of – but that’s for you professional content providers to figure out.
Mike Silva said:
This is a use you probably hadn’t thought of, but this serves as a handy way to convert a formatting heavy Word/Pages/PDF based r
tom said:
I think it would be fairly easy to have the bookmarklet toggle between views of the page. Just save the page’s DOM and styles somewhere, and have a flag for which version the user is looking at. Then do your readability work or revert depending.
camilo vitorino da costa said:
wow! its a great tool. Its funny how many times i have created stylesheets for my favorite sites with something similar, to help me with readability. It works very well on english webpages, but on other languages… im trying to ready some portuguese pages, and it doesn’t work so well. but still great =)
RoscoeW said:
Excellent!
With my vision problems, made two changes and I am a happy camper..thanks
reading everything now
Ben said:
For the ‘ebook’ setting, please set Helvetica as the default font, reverting to the hideous Arial only when Helvetica is not present on the user’s system.
Jeff said:
This is simple, straightforward, works as advertised, and is one of the most useful browser add-ons I could have ever hoped for. Simply beautiful. Return of the reader!
Andi said:
Really good idea, issue:
A click on the bookmarklet should toggle readability view, so that I can go back to the original page view (for navigating).
Andi said:
Second issue: Will you read what I read (a remote script is included) ?
stan said:
Thank you! One issue: at reuters.com, the font size somehow stays small…
Karl B. said:
Great product… one feature request: on pages where the article spans multiple pages, it would be nice to keep the navigation to the next page when you click readability.
gigo said:
Thanks — this is great. I use InstaPaper on my iPhone and occasionally want the same feature on my desktop. It’s amusing reading comments from website designers who feel this tool is bad; if said websites provided the same usability, a tool such as this wouldn’t be necessary.
I worry I’ll come to depend on it, though, and that your site will get hammered with load or go away. Any plans to release this as a public tool, to allow other sites to host the backend portion? (This would also allay fears that the script is scraping or recording the text formatted using it.)
Amy said:
This is great. It works surprisingly well on many sites.
cs said:
excellent, that’s what we need!
if you still thinking to add more features i would suggest:
- adjustable background color (white is too loud)
- instead of a bookmark entry a button should be used (like delicious buttons in firefox) — not everybody uses the bookmarks toolbar
thanks!!!!
q? said:
How is this not reinventing ad blocking?
Richard Ziade said:
Everyone – excellent discussion here – not just about Readability but about the state of delivering content on the Web. I think the reception this has received is evidence that something is really wrong with the Web today (and it seems to be getting worse).
As to all the great feedback, we’re going to incrementally improve Readability. Be sure to subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed as well as our lab RSS feed.
You can also follow the goings-on at Arc90 at our Twitter account.
Thanks again for all the great feedback!
-Rich
Arc90
Alejandro Moreno said:
Very cool. I found a group of blogs that don’t work, though. The ones from Blogsmith Media (Joystiq, Engadget, etc.) just result in a blank screen.
Thanks!
John Clark said:
Cool tool. Habit-forming.
jay gaerlan said:
a good program that hopefully gets improved. My dad is recuperating from a head fall. With the cluttered look of most sites today, he gets confused. A simple approach like this may bring him back to reading news from the net like before.
I think this is one market niche for the product – the elderly, people with eye problems.
Wish list – when you move from one site to next, it reverts to original style – just wish it could be made permanent. AS for web sites losing business over the technology – it is the price they have to pay for deigning them too cluttered and ad laden.
keep up the good work
Bill said:
Please make it work on the iPhone.
Micah said:
This is wonderful, except for the color of links. The default blue looks terribly out of place and garish.
BaddMann said:
I was just looking at content for my new kindle today and the possibilities of converting or viewing web pages on it.
Then Download Squad pointed me at you!
In the creation of the bookmark maybe you can ask if we have a kindle and if we do what’s the email address. Then once we start using the bookmark we can have the option to continue reading this all nicely formatted by readability on our kindles for the 10 cents they charge per email.
I will definitely use this for my HTPC as I can’t read a lot of web sites on my TV screen and the bloody authors won’t let me re-size the fonts.
Thank you.
BaddMann
A-Fan said:
This site does not work too
http://www.jeffruley.com/2009/03/the-last-lecture-and-your-legacy.html
Zelda said:
Hi, I’m probably being dense somehow but does the bookmarklet work with IE7 in Windows XP Professional? I can’t seem to drag it to my toolbar…
I love it in Firefox at home, though :o)
Snorfalorpagus said:
This is brilliant.
I’ve come across a couple of sites that don’t play nice, but on the whole it gets it right. I’m restraining the temptation to look at the code, and am content with telling myself it’s magic.
http://www.macworld.com/article/139208/2009/03/target_disk_mode_to_the_rescue.html
^ That page picks up the comments as the main text, rather than the article itself.
Brad Fults said:
This has quickly become one of my favorite bookmarklets. Great work, all around.
I found a page (and probably a class of pages) that it doesn’t play well with, though:
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Maslow/motivation.htm
Phil said:
When I start to Add to Favorites, I am warned that it “may not be safe”. Is there any truth to that?
Casey said:
Politico.com is broken. Example: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0309/19693.html
cpa said:
Awesome !
But it would be even better if the text were “justified” !
It would really improves (the) readibility !
Quine said:
The biggest problem I see right now is that it falls down on pages with multiple blog-style postings like: http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/.
Only the first entry gets shown
anon said:
while I can get this to work in IE, FireFox gives me this
#readInner {
width: 100% !important;
font-size: 12pt;
with any site, what am I doing wrong. am following directions, adjust things how I want, drag the link to the toolbar and this is what happens…
mousing over the icon
http://labarc90com/experiments/readability/css/readability-print.css
is it possible the link is providing the wrong info?
thanks, this driving me nuts…
anon said:
“Hi, I’m probably being dense somehow but does the bookmarklet work with IE7 in Windows XP Professional? I can’t seem to drag it to my toolbar…”
click on favorites, then select ‘links’ from the selection, it will work that way, you’ll get a warning because this is a scripting event. (“When I start to Add to Favorites, I am warned that it “may not be safe”. Is there any truth to that?”)
how did you get it to work in FF? all I get is an empty page with this on it:
#readInner {
width: 100% !important;
font-size: 12pt;
frustrating because I use FF almost exclusively, and I haven’t had any returns from my email question, nor on this blog. any help would be appreciated.
pascal said:
Readability is fantastic for online news addicts like me! However, there are some webpages (relatively famous ones) which do not display the main text but e.g. the comments only (or nothing at all). So, if you could do anything about the reliability of Readability then I’d do nothing but praise this little helper!
kind regards!
Richard Ziade said:
Everyone – the Readability bookmarklet just got a whole lot smarter. We’ve taken everyone’s feedback of failed pages and such and really tightened up the algorithm. We’re seein a much higher success rate.
Details on the update are here:
http://blog.arc90.com/2009/03/new_version_of_readability.php
Cheers,
Rich
MM said:
Wonderful tool. It would be even more wonderful to have more choices with color and font– for instance, to have the “terminal” background with the “newspaper” font, etc.
Additionally, the blue links are difficult to read in the terminal setting.
Matt Hogan said:
This is wonderful! Great work, you guys!
The only extra feature I would add, and it has been mentioned a few times already, would be support for articles that span multiple pages.
Other than that, this bookmarklet is near perfection!
Martin Wolf said:
This is really nice! Great Work!
iRead said:
Guys, I love you! :-)
Patrick Mackaaij said:
Very cool tool. Too bad it doesn’t work on all sites yet of couse, for instance:
http://www.security.nl/artikel/28018/1/Lekke_HP_printers_massaal_genegeerd.html?utm_source=rssfeed&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rssfeed#
What I’d do is offer a button below to report a site that is not functioning right so people don’t post those here :-)
Chris said:
Paginated Gannett sites are failing to display the second (and subsequent) pages. For an example, check out
http://www.freep.com/article/20090319/SPORTS03/903190402/
or just about any other article on freep.com.
Loving it otherwise. Thanks a bunch!
cl
Jodi Schneider said:
Enterprise Storage Forum is broken, e.g.
http://www.enterprisestorageforum.com/continuity/features/article.php/3812496
Andrew said:
I have an idea to help for pages/sites that don’t render correctly:
Set it up so that if there is a selection when the bookmarket is clicked, the selection would be what is shown. If nothing is selected, it would maintain the same behavior as it has now.
This would make it so that if on given pages it doesn’t find the proper content block, you could override it and force it to show what you want to read.
Just an idea. I really like what you’ve come up with and find myself using pretty frequently. Great work!
Parker Owens said:
Can you please make an accessibility option for individuals with low vision, cataracts, etc.? Probably verdana bolded, with a black or dark blue background, and yellow type, very large with some space between the lines. Thanks!
jon said:
I like using Readability, but I have one problem. It doesn’t take me to page 2. When I read NYT articles, I have to page back from Raedability to the article, scroll down, then click to go to page 2, then click to back to Readability. It would be great if you picked up the page 2 or Next page links from the site and put then in context on the Readability rendering.
Also, I would like to use my own choice of font and point. Personally, I like Arial 10pt. It would be nice to set a default like that. I have True Type fonts on my PC. Couldn’t you sniff them at set up and offer me that choice?
Cheers,
Jon.
Bruce said:
On the following page, it retains the bullet points, but hides the text:
http://www.protection-re.com/index.php?id=14
Roger Wilco said:
This is a really wonderful idea that has transformed my web experience. Thank you so much.
I particularly like the recent (~April 15) changes that make it much easier to revert to the original page and also to print the “more civilized” version of the page. However, it would be even better if the print format could respect my choice of wide margins and print the page as multiple narrow columns. Magazines and newspapers discovered decades ago that narrower columns are easier to read and that’s how I’ve set up Readability for on-screen use.
Thanks again.
incze said:
Many thanks.
maka said:
Many thanks, it’s cool and works! I just wonder is it possible to make ti work in offline mode and to apply the bookmarklet automatically to new pages? For example clicking a link will bring up a processed page instead of having to clicking on the bookmarklet each time.
Michael Dare said:
The only thing missing is the ability to change the settings once installed. “Change settings” should be one of the icons that appears on the left.
yogi22 said:
Excellent!
I was using the Firefox addon RIP to customize often-visited news sites. This was a pain to do, but worth it, until a site would change its format, in which case I would have to repeat the process. Of course, when I linked to unRipped sites, I would be stuck with all the blather that AdBlock couldn’t suppress.
I agree with the poster who wrote, “2) Would prefer as Firefox extension that gives more options, and allows invoking by keystroke.” Actually, I would be happy if anyone can design a method of “invoking by keystroke”. As a result of much linking, I often have many unread news tabs open, that I methodically work my way through. Unfortunately, I also use F11 to give me fullscreen in Firefox. This means that when I close a just-read tab, the next tab appears in original form, and I have to toggle F11, so I can click on the BookMarklet. It would be nice to just hit a hotkey as required.
Is this technically possible?
kk
Richard Ziade said:
Hi KK:
Yes, it’s definitely technically possible. There is a reason we didn’t want to make it automatic: we didn’t want to completely shut out the ad-driven model for most content sites. It is an opt-in capability as it exists today. It’s less convenient, but also a bit less disruptive for the content providers out there.
Channing Walton said:
+1 for colour choice – white on blue is meant to be easy on the eyes
Derek W said:
Hey, I love it. I prefer the terminal font / style myself, but if the text has links in it, my eyes are burning! Blue on green is NOT readable. Please fix that. kthxbai
Kartik Kumar (K 2) Choudhury said:
This is amazing, thanks a ton….K 2
Pamala Grayson said:
I wish that Readability would work w/ Safari 4
Pamala Grayson said:
I wish that Readability would work w/ Safari 4
IRVELLA said:
Love Readability. One problem is I can’t get e-mail icon to work using WinXP SP3, Firefox 3 witn NoScript (nothing blocked). I fill out e-mail form, click and nothing happens. Any ideas?
milo said:
Found a site that doesn’t work consistently, it strips out large chunks of some articles:
http://www.lavidalocavore.org/diary/1682/why-is-time-magazine-peddling-bullshit-on-nais
Another where it mostly works, but strips out the byline and sometimes a line or two at the end:
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2009/05/blogosphere-reality-has-liberal-bias.html
andrei said:
No longer works within Opera. Any hope for a solution?
Hugh Scheffy said:
This really improves the web reading experience. It made me think of the old sliders used in speed reading exercises.
One improvement suggestion: Find a way to pick up the additional pages on an NYT op-ed piece, for example.
Jonatahan said:
Great service, I use it a lot.
Found a minor issue on pages from twoplustwo where cards suites are separated from the card value and put at the start of the line. See e.g. http://www.twoplustwo.com/magazine/issue53/Cairns-Freeshowdown-Bluff.php in Readability for an example.
David Brewster said:
I also use Instapaper on the iPhone for similar functionality but it saves pages for later retrieval. It would be great to be able to use this on the iPhone for instant access to a readable version of a page. Can it be done, e.g. by using a bookmark instead of a bookmark button?
Mark said:
Great tool, I like it. I could be improved in three ways:
- Screen reading is different on printing. When I choose to print via the print option and used a local “print to pdf” solution the PDF-quality was very bad with the font you use. Would be cool if this was improved.
- Also it would be good if the mail article created a real mail with the formated content or as pure text and not only a link to the article.
- with the article, there are some minor formating issues at the end of a sentence.
mark said:
Forgot the link, here it is: http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/gesellschaft/0,1518,627103,00.html#
Tamaranth said:
I love Readability, it’s made web-life so much easier! It’s also invaluable for cleaning up content ready for pasting to my PDA. One thing that’d make it even better is inclusion of the original URL — reading offline, I often need to note the URL for followup online.
Transcontinental said:
Fantastic, I’ve even made a toolbar button to get a web page “readable” without having to click on the Bookmark Toolbar’s ‘Readability’ bookmarklet icon…
This is a marvelous idea, works great on 95% of web pages, a real pleasure, as a welcome to focusing on words, sentences, syntax, rhetoric and … ideas expressed.
Wonderful!
Keyvan said:
I’ve just finished a PHP version of Readability. If anyone’s interested: http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~keyvan-k1m/fivefilters/content-only/annotate/head%3A/readability.php
The reason for porting it to PHP has less to do with making content more readable in your browser and more to do with using the algorithm for identifying content in HTML. I have plans to use it for converting RSS feeds which only provide partial content into full-text feeds.
Thanks arc90! :) Hope the code is useful for any other PHP users out there.
Elaine said:
Here’s a link that Readability didn’t process correctly. I wonder if such links have a “poison pill” that causes Readability to choke?
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/latestnews/stories/062309dnentmcmahon.a58eb3.html
There are quite a few sites that seem to work really well with Readability. Great stuff, overall. I hope you are able to find a way to get around this site’s limitation.
Joe said:
It doesn’t seem to style text that is in tags. The text just remains in the preformatted font (Courier on my system)
Andrea said:
LOVE LOVE LOVE !!!
David said:
Great tool!
As a native spanish, I humbly suggest another translation for spanish setup page:
Readability es una simple herramienta que hace que leer en la web sea m
Devil said:
http://read.devil.co.cc/
AutoScReadr bookmarklet – By mashing up Readability + Autoscroll + Text-to-Speech the result is a useful method for maintaining concentration and reducing fatigue while reading long texts in Firefox.
Dave-in-Georgia said:
GREAT TOOL!!!
Read a few comments. Users should check out the three buttons located on the left side at the top of the page which, on my FireFox browser, always remains at that location whether one scrolls up or down while reading the selected article. Buttons added, below the given three buttons, allowing one to select the Next and Previous pages would be nice but, how can that (coding) be done? Not complaining because Arc90 has been gracious to offer this little gem at no cost.
Thanks! I’m spreading the word.
Keith Dawson said:
Fails on this page; selects the Sponsored Links section at the bottom –
http://advice.cio.com/thomas_wailgum/wall_street_software_scandal_when_does_open_source_become_proprietary_code
That said, Readability works for 999 out of 1,000 Web sites I visit and saves my sanity daily. Thank you!
Michael Fink said:
Great tool that I’m so happy I have just come across – but please, please, please offer Georgia as one of the text options.
I find long text set in Georgia the easiest and nicest to read on-screen – its greater x-height, wider characters and lower contrast (between the thick and thin strokes) make it so much better than Times New Roman on screen.
And it just looks so damn gorgeous; heck, if it’s good enough for your own website isn’t it good enough for everybody else’s too?
If I could give websites the colour contrast of eBook, the text size of Medium , and the column width of Wide, but with it all set in Georgia I’d be in heaven.
Please.
Oskar said:
For this site: http://www.labnol.org/internet/guide-to-useful-bookmarklets/7931/
Clicking the Readability refresh button does not reload all elements of the original page in Firefox 3.5.2. This altered page persists until the cache is cleared.
Additional information: After clicking the Readability refresh button, the url briefly flashes to this:
http://www.labnol.org/internet/guide-to-useful-bookmarklets/7931/#
before returning to the first url and returning the altered page.
Ed said:
Fantastic addition! However, noticed on Obama speech
at http://is.gd/38b3V , Readability missed the last paragraphs. Is there a text limit, or is there something about that page which prevents it from working correctly?
jeux de psp said:
Nice idea!
I also like readability, it made web-life so much simpler. I have even made a toolbar button to get a web page “readable”. Thank you so much for sharing such a nice tool and hope you will offer Georgia as one of the text options.
Diego CHertoff said:
Readability is excellent. I teach computer’use to seniors , and install Readability often for people with vision issues to facilitate the reading of newspapers.
Would be possible to add a background with a picture some light texture to reduce the contrast?
Grace DAry said:
I use it on Firefox and have found it to be awesome on most sites! Just what the doctor ordered to save me from having to wade through lots of excess stuff!
Jack Barker said:
This is a good start, but as near as I can tell (limited use) Readability kills all photos. So if I wanted to save a critical “how-to” article as say, a PDF, I would have to live without the illustrations.
The other biggie is that it will not handle multi-page articles as it eliminates the “next page,” or “continued” links. You have to go back to the original page content, click for the next page, then click the Readability bookmark all over again.
magnesiummangel said:
Really good article. I like readability. And thanks for sharing such a nice information.
Jeffrey said:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/smart_phones/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=220301033
This URL is behaving strangely for me on FF (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090824 Firefox/3.5.3)
rocketmouse said:
First of all, let me say how much I appreciate Readability.
Second, I want to thank the posters who taught me that
Refresh/Reload should get me back to the original so I can
get to the next page(s) – I’ve been going back to the original
email link to accomplish that and it was getting old, fast.
Which brings me to my reason for posting. You invited me to post
if I have any “issues,” and that’s the one. Would it be possible to
incorporate a back button or some other means of getting to
the next page? That would be especially useful when there are
several pages in an article. Consolidating all text from two or more
pages into one long scrollable one also comes to mind as a possibility.
Chris Dary said:
Rocketmouse, if you look at the top left there’s a little refresh icon. If you click that it will refresh the page to the original state.
Anonymous said:
It worked very well in my case. What I would like though, is an option to remove the google ad blocks, image ads, (google image ads) images, also before I could print. Another similar project is printwhatyoulike.com but I found it too complicated as I couldnt select a rectangular area or block which I would just like to print.
Vincent said:
incident report
Take for instance
http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifestyle/games-for-thinkers.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+LifeHack+%28lifehack.org%29
One paragraph title out of two is not displayed
Thanks and regards
Vincent
Rob M. said:
Hey guys ::
1) It’s NOT allowing me to SAVE it or USE it as a TOOLBAR button / icon—
[I'm running FIREFOX 3.5.5 , Win XP Pro].
—-It ONLY works by “saving as standard bookmark” –in other words, i have to OPEN my bookmarks & then select the “Readability” bookmark in order for it to effect the webpage that’s currently open.
2) A Friendly REQUEST here— from a user with EYE Problems:: Can u add a few more viewing-options:: the high contrast of most pages is what causes severe eyestrain-problems for me;
in othe words, DARK text on LIGHT backgrounds is the problem– CAN u create an option for DARK text on GRAY-backgrounds??
(( BTW:: i tried the “Light text on Dark background” that u made, but it’s also harsh on
my eyesight due to contrast.))
Well, THANX— keep up the great work, Rob M.
Steve Taylor said:
Doesn’t seem to work (or is deliberately being defeated) on http://www.boston.com (web site of The Boston Globe).
Advice guy said:
When initially installed, this tool works great, but after Firefox is restarted, it simply stops working. No errors, no activity at all.
Any suggestions?
Robert Weiner said:
Like Zelda, I can’t get it to work with IE 7 under XP. I can bookmark the page, but when I click the bookmark it takes me to the readability web site. It works great with Firefox.
Drw said:
Please add formating for iPhone / mobile to Readability. The small screens need this function most. Bookmarklets word great on the iPhone at least.
David said:
This is a great tool that I have been using for several months. However, I wish it would work on the reading pane of AOL Mail. When I try it, it just hangs.
SirDobermann said:
That’s a cool tool ^^
I’ve been using the advertise-erase plug in for firefox but I have to use IE as well sometimes to check out layouts – and it’s really nice to be able to read just the text of a website inbetween that I stumble over
I’ll give you guys some bookmarks ;-)
Dennis Stork said:
Seems to be another Microsoft only application. Does work on Linux Xubuntu. I tried two browsers.
Chris Dary said:
Dennis, Readability was developed heavily on Macs, and has been tested with Firefox across operating systems.
What browsers did you use?
Richard Cole said:
Works extremely well. Thanks.
It would be great if you could extend it to email pages.
Mike Colby said:
I read about Readability in David Pogue’s article, sounded promising.
Tried it on my Mac (running Leopard) – in both Safari 4.04 and Firefox 3.0.10. It would not install when I “drag the link to the toolbar” as suggested. Absolutely nothing happens in Safari, and I get an error message in Firefox. What am I missing?
mike said:
I was looking forward to trying it, but it doesn’t work for me (Firefox under Ubuntu). Oh well.
robinson said:
First time I tried dragging it to the toolbar nothing happened also. But the second time it worked like a charm! I was using Safari on the Mac. It works well; I especially enjoy turning off the animated ads–they’re such a distraction.
Alvin Steingold said:
Sounds like a great tool. Running Windows XP Pro. Browsers are IE v. 8 and Firefox 3.5.6. I tried installing this program when it first appeared in Pogue’s column. Still can’t get it installed in either browser. Maybe one of your bloggers can help me. Would appreciate any help I can get. Thanks.
Michael said:
For anyone having trouble installing readability:
You might want to take a look at the demo screencast provided over at demogirl; she does a pretty good job of explaining it for newbies!
http://demogirl.com/2009/03/09/readability-provides-easy-on-the-eyes-online-reading/
Bob said:
Would not work for me. When I visit a website and click on the readability link, I get a bunch of links on the left side of the screen. Can you help?
Christopher Werby said:
Very cool tool, thank you very much!
Some strange happenings though on the newspaper SFGate. Here’s an AP article. The first paragraph is missing in the Readability version.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2009/12/31/entertainment/e161208S62.DTL&tsp=1
danny bloom said:
i love it. just what i needed. now when i am “screening” online, i can read better….screening is a new term for reading online contact, as opposed to real READING which is reserved just for reading on paper…..
Mama Whale 24 said:
Ok, y’all. There IS a way to return to the original page. Look in the upper left hand corner! Click the “reload original page” icon. Easy! Can’t believe y’all missed this. :)
Kailas Karthikeyan said:
Hi readability was not able to take the key operating text from http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_25/b3989422.htm . You can try it yourself.
Dan said:
Just to second what others have already wished for, please, please make it available for iPhone /iPod touch.
Thanks
Astroby said:
I really like Readability but I’m having trouble with margins. No matter which margin size I select, the page is always crammed over to the left, almost obscuring the first letter of every sentence. It’s very irritating to the point of being unuseable.
What am I doing wrong?
Astroboy said:
Well, after more testing, it seems it all depends on the original format. NYT and WaPo scrunch to the left, but other sites such as Salon and Alternet ARE centered in accordance with my margin selection. I’m beginning to really like this program. Thanks Rich!
H. Mallow said:
Wonderful idea, but when I saw one of the settings was called terminal, I expected a black background with white or green text. That combination is both readable and restful to the eyes. I look forward to seeing a more configurable version in the future
Larry said:
I’m absolutely new to this. I tried installing it on all my browsers: Chrome, Foxfire, and then Safari.
So far it only works on Safari but I’m reading these comments also to see what others say about installation.
Great app. for peace and quiet, love it.
Keith2468 said:
To those wondering how to TOGGLE back to the original web page layout.
There is a reload icon in the left margin.
You click it and the page re-loads in its original format.
It did take some looking to find it. Maybe those buttons could be made higher contrast?
Allan Berggren said:
I’ve waited long for this..Thanks for keeping us ordinary blokes in mind.
Larry said:
Thank you for this wonderful program. Works well with Safari on a MAC. Great job.
Larry said:
Thank you for this wonderful program. Great job. Works well with Safari on a MAC.
Creagh said:
I can no longer get onto my webmail (microsoft, unfortunately–it’s for work) account from home on this computer. I installed readability yesterday, and around the same time lost the ability to re-connect.
I’d like to try un-installing readability, but can’t figure out how! Can you help?
I do like the program, here’s another suggestion: when a NYTimes article has multiple pages, the ability to get to the next page doesn’t show up on the readability-altered page. Can you include that?
Thanks
Creagh
Guy said:
Great tool, but it does not seem to work on Chrome, or I haven’t found a way yet!
Martha said:
This is a useful tool but in some cases the advertisements that are made to look like news stories are not ‘caught’ by Readability and instead Readability actually removes the notice about the story being a paid advertisement, making it look more like a news story than it was trying to look or is allowed to look. For example, check out this advertisement for teeth whitener which enrolls you into a program and deducts from your credit card monthly. If you see it with the help of Readability it does not even look like an advertisement.
http://www.consumernewsreporter.com/teethwhitening/?sub=p360
Kevin said:
Had 2 problems with eweek http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Apple/Apple-Predictions-for-2010-iPhone-on-Multiple-Carriers-iSlate-Beatles-198004/
First is that it’s a 2 page story, and readability removes the link to the second page.
Second is that for some reason, hitting the “return to original” button on that page does not take me back to the page I was on but instead takes me to http://www.eweek.com/# without changing the browser history at all. So I can’t even use the back button to get back to the page.
This was on Safari 4.0.4 on Mac OS X 10.5.8
Slick said:
This is a fantastic tool! Using Firefox 3.6 Beta 5 under W7 64-bit; working in both IE8 and the 32-bit version of Firefox. Have not tried it with the 64-bit version of FF (Shiretoko), as it is still a little quirky anyway!
Suggestion for new feature: I would love to have the app figure out a way to ‘automatically’ append all additional “pages” of an article In other words, if there is a button/link for “Page 2″, etc., then grab it and append. Or at least provide the “Page 2″ link in the “Readability” converted page!
Now THAT would be the cat’s meow, as they say!!
Thanks for a GREAT solution 8-)
Slick
Kevin said:
Looks beautiful. I love it.
On my site – a wordpress blog – readability only renders one of the entries on the home page and it seems to choose an entry from the middle rather than the first one.
JQP said:
This is great!!! The ability to further customize font and style of the text would be great. So far so great!!
Steve said:
Great tool! I understand the concerns of folks associated with sites that survive or thrive via advertising, but feel that advertising needs to adapt to consumer-friendly technology such as this–perhaps by making that advertising less distracting and obnoxious, for instance?–rather than vice versa.
In any event, two suggestions I’d echo are: 1) an easy tab (or some other method) for revising the font size, page margin, etc. while viewing a site and 2) a tab for restoring the original appearance of the site.
Carol said:
OMG – This is the BEST THING!
I’m forwarding it to everyone I know!
What can I say but thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
mark said:
Does this work with Google Chrome? It does not seems to be working for me.
Wendell said:
This great, thanks so much. I use it with Chrome and have no problems at all .
Mark I. said:
I also had a problem with XP and IE7 – the bookmark simply returned me to the Readability setup page. Here’s how I got it to work: Adjust your settings as desired, then *right-click* the “Readability” button to display the floating context menu. Select “Add to Favorites.” This creates an entry in your Favorites list that, when clicked, will launch Readbility and it will function as advertised. If you look at the properties of this “favorites” entry, you’ll see that it’s a very long command that uses javascript and includes your desired settings. I copied and pasted this string into the properties of my old “Links” button that simply returned me to the website, and now that Links icon works, also. Hope this helps.
V.K. said:
Cool!
It should have an option on the “Read” page that allows you to change the style though (without have to make over a link each time) ! …but nice!
(Found it shared on FB and I also shared it on FB!)
Lille Skvat said:
Great tool! I have a suggestion, though. When I use it to read a blog, like my own, I can only see the first post. You should add a link to take you to the next page.
jdm said:
Nice idea! Biggest initial concern: it strips out NY Times bylines. Other concern (in Firefox): the “small” font size is too small, and “medium” is too large… there is a huge gap between them. Agree that it would be nice to have an easier way to change settings… can edit the bookmark properties, but that’s finicky. Thanks!!
Scott said:
Simple workaround for Firefox 3.5 to use keystroke to “turn on” Readability (doesn’t involve installing any plugin):
1. Under Bookmarks, choose Organize Bookmarks.
2. Select the Bookmarks Toolbar, then select the “Readability” bookmark living there.
3. Click More on the lower pane so that you can see the Keyword field.
4. Type in a shortcut for the link in the keyword field. For example, I use the single lower-case letter L – “l” (no quotes). I only enter the single letter l as the keyword field.
5. Close the bookmark window.
6. Now in Firefox go to the page you want to have Readability reformat.
7. When you’re in that window, Type Cmd-l (that’s an L) to highlight the location (address) field, then type the letter L (lowercase) and press Enter. You’ll activate Readability.
Essentially all you’re doing here is making use of Firefox tags and using Cmd-l (that’s an L) to quickly move the focus to the address bar. Once in the address bar you enter the tag (in my case the single letter l) and hit enter.
Here’ the process if now follow to reformat a page with readability in Firefox. From the page you want to reformat hit Cmd-l (that’s an L) and the type the letter l, then enter.
I like this approach because I didn’t have to install any add-ons and it should work in all versions of Firefox that support Readability. Hope it’s not to confusing and works if you’re looking for a keyboard shortcut to use Readability.
Thanks for the great Bookmarklet!!!
chemden said:
Readability does not appear to work on the Safari app on the iPhone. I hope you would add that functionality. Now that would really be useful.
dancingbear said:
But when I use it for the New York Times, I get a blank page! Did NYT do something to block Readability from working now that David Pogue has promoted it?!
Larry said:
Just curious, those who are having success with chrome, which operating system are you running?
Larry said:
Scott:
When you say “type Cdm-l” in step 7 above, where is the cursor when you do that?
I went to Start > Run and typed Cmd l and tried Cmd-l .
I know I’m almost there, I just don’t know where the cursor is located when you type “Cmd-l” and to you type the “-” or is that a space?
Thanks
Esand said:
I don’t know how I ever got along without “Readability.” It’s certainly the best free tool of 2009.
I use it on my Mac [Safari 4] and have been able to make a keyboard shortcut to launch RB, but I was wondering if there were shortcuts for the 3 icons on the left of the screen: Exit, Print, Email. I’d love not to have to reach for my mouse.
Many Thanks Arc90!!
Scott said:
Re: Simple workaround for Firefox 3.5 to use keystroke to “turn on” Readability (doesn’t involve installing any plugin):
After you setup the keyword (as described above) in FireFox.
1. Browse to the page you want to reformat in FireFox
2. From Firefox in the window you want to reformat, Type Cmd-l (that’s an L)
3. The keyboard input will now go to the address bar in Firefox.
4. Type the keyword you setup for Readability, in example above the letter-L “l” (no quotes)
5. Hit enter, and the page should get reformatted by Readability
This has been working really well for me in Firefox
Scott said:
“Scott:
When you say “type Cdm-l” in step 7 above, where is the cursor when you do that?
I went to Start > Run and typed Cmd l and tried Cmd-l .
I know I’m almost there, I just don’t know where the cursor is located when you type “Cmd-l” and to you type the “-” or is that a space?
Thanks”
On windows it should be CTRL-L (ie. hold down CTRL key and L key). This is just a keyboard shortcut to move the focus for keyboard input to the address bar.
HB said:
Great tool – now and then inadvertent humor when a sidebar comment gets mixed into body text. Today’s great example (A CNN report on a murder) is as follows:
“The couple arrived in Miami on Thursday to ring in the new year by watching Lady Gaga perform, police said. It’s so horrific. They’d have to be a monster. It’s a dastardly act.
–Lt. Neal Cuevas, police spokesman “
James Jackson said:
I love the tool, but it no longer works on DallasNews.com. It did before this week… maybe they’ve coded their site somehow to defeat Readability?
Jim Flint said:
Love this “junk stripper,” but hey, why does it strip author info and pub. date when I use it on a NY times article? Might be nice to fix this…..
Thanks!
Jim said:
I really like Readability and use it often.
One gripe: the date of publication (e.g., of a newspaper article) disappears. I do a lot of research and find Readability very useful on a daily basis. That includes printing what I’ve read, but the printed copy (like what I read on the screen) has no date of publication.
Jem said:
Love the tool. A couple of suggestions (which others also referred to):
- It should open in a new tab, or at least the Back button should go back to the original site (without having to reload the original site, for Firefox at any rate).
- It should understand articles split into several screens/pages, and should load the complete article (I realise technically this is a bit trickier)
- It should be configurable for text size, style etc. from the browser menu (or somewhere) without having to create a new button or editing the button properties.
Many thanks for this tool.
WaltDeluna said:
I’m sure this suggestion has reached you already but here is a vote to put it at the top of the wish list: Implement the “next page” links which now (e.g. on NYT articles) do not show. It saves “only” an extra two steps (reload, scroll down) but would be very nice to have.
A great product – Thank you!
Tanya Brown said:
Readability has transformed my web use — I don’t have to close a page that offends my eyes or just isn’t clear enough to read!
I’m perfectly happy using F5 to reload original page (unlike 90% of commentors!)
The one improvement that would make a world of difference for me is inclusion of the original URL at the end of the page — quite often I’m downloading a page to read offline and I end up manually pasting this in.
Fabulous utility, thank you!
Bruce Van Allen said:
Readability is very nice!
I second the comments from others about picking up multi-page articles — either find the “single page” version, if there, or keep the “next page” links.
ALSO: very important for printing is the inclusion of the url of the article being printed. I just did some research for a friend, viewing in Readability and printing articles as I went. Then I discovered that, unlike most web browsers, Readability didn’t include the urls.
So now I have to re-trace my steps to the articles I printed, and hand-copy the urls on to the printed versions. Big time suck, but necessary to keep the articles from being next to worthless. With no reference URLs, how would my friend look into it, if, say, two articles disagreed about something important?
Thanks for a nice tool.
Thanks.
charlie r. said:
I think I saw your “Readability App” in a MAC magazine. I loaded it on my computer and never used it. I also loaded it in my graduate school daughter’s Apple computer and showed her how it worked. She is dyslexic and I thought she might really like it when working on the net. Here is the email I received today:
“I love the new application you loaded on my comp titled “readability”…Makes things way way way easier.”
There was also a love you, dad included with the email.
Good luck with future projects.
Charlie R
Bruce Couper said:
Thank you! I must use speech recognition software along with text-to-speech and a few other little tricks to make my life easier living with various disabilities. Getting my computer to read just the important bits on web pages when my eyes are not up to it was doable but tedious. You just made things much easier for me!
I am using Readability alone or in combination with gleebox. When using it alone I use a macro I created which does exactly as a previous commentor does, executing the bookmarklet from the address bar with a keyword (“readability”). In my case I do this by simply saying, “readability”. Your little utility does its magic and my macro proceeds to have the text read to me with my text-to-speech software (TextAloud). Nice!
In case it is of use to anyone: a macro can also simply dump the JavaScript into the address bar followed by the Enter key.
grabby said:
I am using IE6. I added the link to favorite as per the tutorail and click READIBILITY on a web page. After clicking many times it work. Now I am unable to restore to original page format. How do I uninstall this tool. Your help is appreciated.
aeea said:
Many thanks for an extension for Google Chrome and it would be nice to read two pages mode :)
Chris said:
Hi, I agree that Readability is the tool of the century. But I also agree with ARVELLA: One problem is I can’t get the email icon to work, except that I am using Windows Vista with IE 8. I fill out e-mail form, click “Email Page”, and nothing happens. Any ideas?
larry seltzer said:
The last day or two I’ve noticed a problem with the “Single Page” views on slate.com, e.g. http://www.slate.com/id/2245180/pagenum/all/
After the readbility redraw of the page with just the comment section from the bottom. It doesn’t always happen, but usually
Daniel said:
On some article pages on dn.se, readibility will only show the comments section.
http://www.dn.se/sport/os-vancouver/helena-jonsson-blickar-framat-1.1048950
Richard said:
Since wide screen is more and more popular in today’s laptops and desktops. I strongly believe a two columns view (or multiple column view) is a very useful features. in addition, coupled with this feature, using pages instead of scroll is more appropriate. Scrolling make one lost during the read but it might be easier for one to temporarily remember the page number and navigate back and forth.
Mr. TA said:
Ingenious solution to an annoying problem. And one of the most useful experiments in the history of experimenting. Thanks very much.
Here comes the criticism. Found it not to work on this page:
http://www.databasejournal.com/features/mssql/article.php/3865201/Ten-Problems-with-XQuery-and-the-SQLXML-Standard.htm
Tom said:
This is an excellent tool. However it would be much more useful if there was a choice of colours. This would be particularly useful for those with reading difficulties such as dyslexia which often benefit from different colours (e.g. http://www.springerlink.com/content/w50214151x211106/) – traditionally for printed text ‘colour overlays’. I do hope you’ll add this option, it would be very useful for me, as I have this problem!
Daryl said:
One comment / request:
I am using Readability on my Nokia N900 mobile phone (yes, it does a great job running bookmarklets!) It works great, the only problem I have is when I bring up the “email page” dialog, I can never get to the bottom of the dialog to “send” or “cancel”. It seems to be due to the smaller screen resolution (800×480). Is there a way to change the dialog so that it does not try to remain stationary on the screen and allows the user to scroll down? Or perhaps shrink the dialog to accommodate that resolution.
Thanks. Really useful tool.
Ron said:
Great solution, especially useful for formatting and printing nytimes.com film reviews, which otherwise use a non-wrapping format-for-printing option. One curiosity: For these reviews, the Readability conversion invariably discards the name of every author except A.O. Scott, whose name always appears over the article in the Readability version. Has Mr. Scott’s name been especially coded into Readability? If so, it would be useful if the names of other regular NYT authors could similarly be made to show up.
Canned said:
Very nice tool.
I found a page today that doesn’t work with Readability (Firefox extension 0.7.5), the article text vanishes: http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2010/03/29/christian-militia.html?sid=101
(It’s interesting to note that the page works better with ads enabled. Disabling ads causes the annoying wide text lines.)
John said:
I love this tool, I added a link to the script in my bookmarks bar and use it all the time. The one feature I would love would be an ability to combine multiple paged articles into one page. The way places like New York Times, etc., do this is such a blatant money grab for additional ad clicks, and it really detracts from my reading experience- much in the way those “to continue, turn to page B47″ from conventional newspapers were always so irritating.
If there was some way to incorporate this feature, readability truly would be the best thing to hit the web since, well, the last really great thing.
Salamander said:
sometimes maybe a good option for visible impaired or blind users – go on developing – good ideas
Dave said:
I’m using the Readability add-in for Firefox. On this article – http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/world/asia/05karzai.html?th&emc=th – Readability sometimes (but not always) drops out words that are links in the original article. For example, Taliban is dropped from the second paragraph.
And a suggestion. Rather than implementing the “next page” links in NYTimes (and maybe others), invoke the “single-page” mode before recoding the page. That would really be cool.
Paul G said:
This was shown to me by a client, and I’m now spreading the word. Fantastic! What a pleasure. It’s so much more enjoyable to read online now. Since I live in Israel, I would like to see support for right to left text. It’s still very useful for reading Hebrew text in spite of not justifying to the right. Thank you.
wsh said:
for those who would like a favicon associated with the bookmarklet, paste this into an html file and import it.
Bookmarks
Bookmarks Menu
Readability
Ned Gulbran said:
I just installed Readability in my Mac Powerbook. It did the job, BUT a notice popped up and said that no width and length limits were installed. That meant that it would begin an infinite (and eternal) loop. Which it did, and I was locked in forever. I had to shut down the computer to escape.
Chris Denesha said:
Does not include the comments at the bottom of articles at macosxhints.com, i.e. http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050326041757989&msg=15
Rasmus Underbjerg Pinnerup said:
Fantastic concept! But you should separate the choice of text-background colour (black on white vs. white on varying shades of black) from choice of font style.
Also, Readability should not automatically capitalize every word-first letter in a headline seing as this a language specific phenomenon and many languages don’t use this practice.
Rio said:
Occasionally, I get an error window titled: Message from webpage:
jCarousel: No width/height set for items. This will cause an infinite loop. Aborting….
Clicking the OK button in the window renders the page properly so the only issue is why the error message is displayed. Refresh followed by Readability reproduces the error and results.
Environment: WinXP SP3, IE8, Java version 6 update 20
Readability is the best reading tool ever. Could not function without it. Would like to see Readability toolbar button per this Microsoft article: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa753588(VS.85).aspx
I attempted to create the button for Readability but could not get it to function. I prefer an IE8 toolbar button because I don’t display the Favortites toolbar except for Readability.
GWinters said:
Using IE8 256-bit at home and it will not work. No worries! I’ll just use Firefox.
Nicolas said:
I dragged the Readability Button on the bookmarklet bar of Safari 5 and Firefox 3.6.6 but it didn’t work. I did it from the following web:
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/es/
Would it work on the Safari installed on IPad?
It did work when I installed TidyRead instead
Please, any suggestion to nicolas.navarro@me.com. The “installation” process seems to be really easy (?)
Thank you.
Chris Waggoner said:
Love the tool and I use it every day! Two bug notes on http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/200905/the.tiles.of.infinity.htm:
Necipoğlu
Topkapı
The ğ and ı don’t display correctly.
Matt said:
A couple of bugs (noticed in Chrome on Win 7):
1 major one: readability disables/breaks Shift+Space page-up functionality, a shortcut that’s great for keyboard lovers who don’t want to move their hand to reach the mouse or the page up key. Shift+Space now just acts the same as space – it pages down.
Readability has problems with this 2-page article: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/08/bob-inglis-tea-party-casualty
It repeats the 2nd page 7 times. (The 2nd page starts with “Inglis found that” – search it in the Readability version to see the 7 hits.)
Thanks for a fantastic application.
moec said:
My wife has readability working on her laptop (windows 7 and IE 8) and it works well. Unfortunately I can’t get anywhere with it on my desktop with windows 7 and IE 8. Any insights?
kaol said:
This is really most excellent! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been having discussions with my wife about the issue of readability in regard to so-called online magazines. Up until now I haven’t been able to actually show her what I meant, but now you’ve done it for me. So far I’ve noticed some variability in regard to which browser I use on what platform, but I’ve got enough browsers (and platforms) that readability is now a permanent fixture in my life. It is going to save me a lot of eyestrain, and shorten the time I spend reading on the web each day. Thank you for doing this.
kaol said:
I tried to sell a friend on this and the first thing he noticed was that it has a problem with bylines and datelines, both of which are important to someone who wants to archive these nice readable pages. More often than not it drops one or both, though sometimes it will pick them up okay.
Mehmet Kose said:
As a sysadmin, this tool is like gnu screen (http://www.gnu.org/software/screen/) to me. I can’t think what how life was before I found it.
This is the only page Readability doesn’t work:
http://zaman.com.tr/yazar.do?yazino=1024390
Jeff said:
It’s brilliant, only doesn’t work properly on Telegraph news pages (misses the first 2 paragraphs) eg http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7991492/Rubbing-hands-together-after-washing-them-increases-the-danger-of-contamination-scientists-warn.html
Mr. Chopper said:
It also doesn’t work on the Guardian website (www.guardian.co.uk), because the ID they use for their articles is “article-wrapper”. I have created my own local version which adds “article-wrapper” to the list of positive matches in the relevant regex and it works fine, so if you could update the script to include this it would be great. Other than that, it’s much better than other pretenders (ahem, Readable).
Charlie S said:
Such a great extension, would just be good if you didn’t need to enable javascript on the page to make it work. Not sure if you can get it to run under chrome namespace instead? Using it in conjunction with noscript would be perfect :)
Fabio said:
Hello guys, I’m a regular user of Readability, it’s an amazing tool!
Congratulations for the excellent job!
bbleeker said:
I love Readability!
AndyW said:
Great, great tool – Love it ! One site that doesn’t work so well is
http://www.democratandchronicle.com
See article at http://www.democratandchronicle.com/article/20110119/SPORTS0101/101190337/1007/SPORTS/Andrew-Jones-could-be-a-bargain-for-Yankees
Readability, upon activation, strips out all article text, and brings up only the byline…
Otherwise, great stuff !
RichJ said:
Thanks for the great tool. Can you make it compatible with Firefox 4?
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