Learn How To Use Reader View To Read Articles Online

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's take a look at using Safari Reader View. 

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The Reader View has been around in Safari for a long time but a lot of people still don't know it's there. It's just a really nice way to be able to read articles on webpages. It gets rid of a lot of the extra things like navigation, ads, links to other articles. It allows you to adjust the text very easily to make it easier to read.

So using Reader View is pretty straight forward. First you have to be at a webpage in Safari that has some text on it. So an article, for instance. So it's not going to show up on home pages for things, on pages that are just videos or some graphics. Things like that. But if you go to an article, like this page, you'll see this symbol appear here. If you click on it, it instantly switches you to Reader View and you can see it's a dramatic difference. The page goes away and instead you get a headline, some information like perhaps a byline, date, time, that kind of thing. Then you get the text of the article and the photos pertaining to that article. 

Now Safari is making some guesses here based on what it finds on the webpage. So you're going to get different results on different sites. Sometimes you'll get it just perfect like this. Other times it may be missing images or may include images that don't have to do with the article. Sometimes you may even be missing text. So it's not perfect. But in most cases it does get you a clean view of just the article. There's a lot more too because you get controls here. 

You click here and now you can increase or decrease the font size. You can change the background to make it easier for you to read. You can change the font to one that you like. Basically tools that make it easier for you to read the text on a page. To exit Reader View you simply click this again. Now there's a keyboard shortcut for this too. You can go to View and then Show Reader, Shift Command R, and this will get you into Reader View and out of it as well.

Now I mentioned in some cases you may be missing important parts of the webpage. But even when it works perfectly you may be missing things. Like, for instance, there's a comment section here below. You're not going to see that in Reader View. You also may get suggestions for other articles and links to related things. Those may not show up in Reader View too. So I find it's best to use it to read the article but make sure you switch out of Reader View to see what else is there on the page as well.

Now you can tell Safari to always show articles at a site in the Reader View when possible. You can do this by going to the Safari menu and then Settings for this Website when you're at the site. You can also Control click here on the Address Bar and select the Settings for this Site right there. Here you can choose Use Reader When Available. So here I'll go to the Home Page for my site and you can see there's no Reader View there. But if I go to an article it instantly switches to Reader View.

Now a lot of people get themselves into trouble here. They do this and then find that some pages at the site don't work quite so well. For instance, MacMost has a lot of pages that just have videos on them and they're not going to be ideal for Reader View. So they get stuck in this mode and don't see how to get out of it. To Exit it you can always click this button here to exit for that page or you can go back to Setting for this Site and turn that off and just use it on a case by case basis by pressing that button or using the keyboard shortcut.

You can also go into Safari Preferences and then go into Websites and click on Reader and here you'll see the settings you have for every site. So I have sites here that have a specific setting. But you can change it to Off or On for these sites and it will include the currently open sites and any that you specifically configured. Also you can set it up for every other site. So you can turn it On for every site this way. This is a really bad idea because there are plenty of sites out there that don't work very well with Reader View and it can be very confusing to go to them at first and not be able to figure out what you're looking at. So I recommend leaving it Off.

Now Firefox also has a Reader View. If you go to an article there you'll see this little Reader View icon there. It's called the same thing. Click on that and it works in a very similar way just that the tools here are on the left now and there's even a voice narration feature. 

What about Chrome? Well, Chrome really doesn't have a Reader View although you'll find a lot of articles that say that it does. They're either talking about one or two things. Either extensions you can add that kind of simulates reader view and you can certainly buy one of those. There's also a distill mode that you can enable and it's something you enable in experiments here. So you have to go to this specific URL and then you'll see Enable Reader mode. You can turn that on. Once you do you're going to have to relaunch Chrome and once it's relaunched you'll get this distill mode. Once that's on you'll get this little button here that you can click. It's a Reader View but without any of the options so you really can't change much of anything. I find it just doesn't work as well. In a simple article like this it works okay but on more complex articles it doesn't work very well at all. Clearly even Goggle still considers it an experiment.

Now keep in mind a big different between Safari, Firefox, and Chrome is that neither Safari nor Firefox have much of a stake on the ads on the page. Whereas Chrome, made by Goggle, is very invested in those ads. So getting rid of the ads in Reader View isn't in Goggle's best interest. This is probably why Chrome is lagging behind in this and may never have as good a reader view as Safari and Firefox do. 

Safari for iPhone and iPad also have this function. So here I am in Safari for the iPhone and you see the little button at the top left hand corner. I tap that and I can bring up Reader View and once I'm in Reader View I can tap it again and increase the font size or change the background and I can go to website Settings for this site and turn on Use Reader Automatically just like you can on the Mac.

Now sometimes Reader View won't show up even though the page looks like a normal article. This is simply because Safari can't figure out what the actual text is on the page. This could be because the page is designed poorly or maybe it's designed specifically to not allow Reader View because the site relies on ads and wants to show all of the other content on the page as well.