Comment by ryandrake
6 hours ago
> This post purposefully ignores the reduced motion preference to give everyone the same truly terrible experience. I am sorry. Please use your browser’s reader mode.
"Reader Mode" shouldn't even be a special mode. It should just be the default browsing experience, and users who want all this styling crap should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something.
I want a reader mode that renders the page as if it were in an extremely tall window (ie. 10+ screens tall), then gives me a scrollable view of that static image of the rendered page. My browser should lie to the page on my behalf, and make it behave as if everything were already on-screen.
Materialistic[0] effectively does this (minus the screenshot part), not intentional I think (I belive it makes the webview as tall as the requested page and then uses the OS native scroll widget to add a scrollbar for it). The problem I regularly encounter with this is sites that have a vertically centered popup (cookie banner, newsletter, etc.), with a backdrop that obscures the whole page. You first have to scroll down quite a bit (half the size of the article) to be able to click the popup away.
[0]:https://github.com/hidroh/materialistic
the reason "reader mode" isn't the default is to discourage website authors from intentionally breaking reader mode
-_-
This. It's fundamentally a social problem. The moment that reader mode becomes the default, they'll start gradually extending it with "useful" additions until it's just as bloated and painful again, and then we'll have some rebrand of the concept of reader mode, and the cycle starts anew.
"Why can't we have a functional version of the site for the blind, and the normal one for everyone else?"
'We have that! It's called HTML!"
Edit: Earlier version of this point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20224961
"should have to enable "Clown Mode" or something."
Bwahahaha, +1! This reminds me of calling Windows XP's default motif "Fisher-Price" mode. Which, sadly, looks professional and efficient compared to Windows (and, increasingly, the Mac) today.
I like that Apple was trying somwthing that has a little more texture and soul to it, but Liquid glass needs a lot of work to be made more subtle and usable. 10 out of 10 idea, 3 out of 10 execution.
I actually think modern windows looks nice. It isn't nearly as good as the classic 9x look, but fluent obviously is a response to the visual shitshow that was 10
Big Sur made me take back every Fischer Price comment I ever made about Windows XP. I didn't think it was possible to make a more childish UI than Aqua, but here we are.
On MacOS and iOS you can set reader mode as default. You should set reader mode as default.
what a good idea to have this automatically come up when the page opens, and perhaps give user a few seconds to press escape to get rid of it, if needed
Why just a few seconds? In reader mode you can press escape any time to close it.