Here’s good news for Google Chrome lovers! The desktop version of the favourite browser is getting a reader mode, which can be used to strip out a page’s unnecessary distractions like ads, animations, and other background content, leaving only the text and article images.
The feature launched in Chrome’s experimental Canary release, is expected to make its way to more stable versions of the browser in the future.
Reader modes have become a standard browser feature after Safari added it in 2010, and Firefox and Microsoft’s Edge browser had one since at least 2015. All these allow one to change the the background color of the page and adjust the font to a comfortable size.
However, the new mode isn’t entirely new for Chrome. It has existed for a while in the Android version of the app where it was called ‘simplified’ view, and it can be turned on from the browser’s accessibility menu. The desktop version’s reader mode is a renamed port of this accessibility option, as noted in a bug report that was spotted back in February.
To enable the new functionality, one have to use an up-to-date version of Chrome’s experimental Canary release and then put a page into reader mode by clicking the settings button on the top right of the browser and selecting ‘Distill page.’
Happy reading, folks!
