Reader Mode: It Just Works

I’m the kind of internet user for whom the Firefox Reader View feature is only occasionally useful. Most mainstream browsers have something like it these days. I’m sure there are people out there who can’t imagine using the internet without it. For me, it’s a lot like having a unique screwdriver that’s a better choice for some jobs than resorting to a suitably-sized flathead and hoping for the best: most of the time you can’t use it, but when you can, you’re really glad to have it.

I’ve often wondered how exactly this feature works. This is partially out of curiosity. Sometimes it gets things slightly wrong, which, sadly, makes me reluctant to trust it. Its shortcomings suggest something really tricky going on under the hood. I can’t help but wonder where in the pinball machine of <div> tags and CSS class names that particular bit of authorial intent got lost. Sometimes you notice the little Reader View icon in the address bar for pages that can’t plausibly look decent that way, or sometimes it’s missing from pages that by all accounts should have it. But in addition to rubbernecking and taking cheap shots at a brave attempt to address a difficult problem, there’s also a more cooperative motivation: how can I structure the stuff I put online in a way that will reliably look good in Reader View, and reader modes in general?

This is, sadly, a poorly-documented topic. Resources consist mainly of Stack Overflow questions, questions on the Webmasters Stack Exchange, threads on Mozilla’s support forums, now-deleted blog posts, etc. all of which link to each other. The advice seems to boil down to “It applies a bunch of heuristics that work pretty well if your HTML is good.”

Why isn’t it standardized yet?

After some digging I found this excellent series of 4 articles by Daniel Aleksandersen from 2018 about features like Reader View that discusses their history, the failed attempts at standardization, an overview of how these features work and how they differ across implementations, and a plea to finally standardize the dang thing. The fact that Daniel is writing from 2018 is a little disheartening. A lot of what he writes still feels very relatable. It’s a relatively simple problem, at least compared to what’s typical for the web, so how could we not have made any progress on it in almost 6 years?

An uncharitable reading of the situation might conclude that Reader View and features like it are useless, something completely forgotten by browser vendors and content authors alike, the kind of problem that standardization alone can’t solve. But a quick scan of the issues and pull requests for Readability.js (the tool used for implementing the Firefox Reader View) suggest that there are at least a few people who want the feature to be good, and some of them even work at Mozilla. From another perspective, the scattered and wishy-washy advice for how to cooperate with Reader View is a testament to the feature’s overall reliability, an indication that people are content to accept the situation as-is. If it’s not broken, why fix it? How broken is it actually?

To Mozilla’s credit, they, like all browser vendors, are up against some pretty steep odds. These days, most of the HTML on the internet is written with desktop and mobile users in mind, and occasionally will also consider screen readers and dark modes. For everything else, you just have to make do with what you’ve got. A well known fact about standards is that their mere existence doesn’t mean much on its own, and this plays out on the web with discouraging regularity. Many of the web’s standards, such as CSS media queries, semantic HTML, ARIA definitions, and even private standards like AMP, feel hopelessly optimistic when pitted against the chaotic and laissez-faire reality of web content. In a world where quirks mode exists, is it anything but a waste of time to give people the option to ditch the separate “print view” and instead do it all in one page with HTML and CSS? Maybe some problems are doomed by human nature to remain unsolved forever, and a reliable reader mode is one of them.

Unfortunately, the incentives are rarely aligned between browser vendors and web content authors (although the situation is improving), and vendors are significantly outnumbered. There are only a handful of browsers, even including those with just a small fraction of the total market, and they are motivated to be secure, robust, and compliant with all the latest standards. Content authors, however, vary wildly in their goals, and not all of them will necessarily care (or have the time and resources to care) about things like whether the page works on a phone, whether “Print to PDF” looks good, whether CSS grid would have been a better choice than <table> (what year is it?), whether repeated   is the right way to do indentation, etc. If any of these things creates a problem for users, realistically it’s up to the browser vendors to do something about it (usually something hacky) since you can’t pin your hopes of capturing market share on content authors doing the right thing: if CNN looks good in every browser but yours, that’s your problem, even if it’s really CNN’s fault.

Denial

And this is why reader modes are interesting to me. The incentives are aligned here. Browser vendors (with the possible exception of Google) want them to work well, users want them to work well, and, clearly, there are more than a few web content authors that want them to work well for their sites. Furthermore, the idea seems pretty aligned with accessibility. So why does the implementation still feel like a hack? Why has nobody tried to standardize this? At this point it’s clear that reader modes are here to stay, so why not try to make them good? How is this different from AMP, which for a brief time was everywhere even though people hated it? How is this different from the Open Graph protocol? How is this different from Sitemaps or WebP or Flexbox?

Anger

The main difference? A standard won’t help. Not that much, anyway. The web community finds itself in a situation which is all too familiar to software engineers: things are good enough, and the problems aren’t a big deal. The only changes to reader modes that anyone feels are worth the time and energy are the small, incremental ones that gradually improve the situation, and widespread adoption of a standard is simply not one of those things. Ultimately, most of the people who would play nice with a standardized reader mode are already reciting the <article> and <p> incantations they got from Stack Overflow.

Bargaining

Furthermore, for the small number of people that want a good reader mode experience for their website but can’t make it work, a standard won’t necessarily help them. Standards can be poorly thought out, can be caught off guard by broader changes, can be merely a restatement of an existing implementation, can specify things that never get implemented, etc. Standards can be bad too, and fixing a broken standard is not an easy task. You’re much more likely to get the <table> extraction for your page fixed by submitting an issue to a GitHub repo (or fixing it yourself, maybe) than by going through the process of having the standard amended in a way that everyone feels will fix all <table> extraction everywhere for all time.

Depression

Cynically, a standard could even make things worse. The whole point of a reader mode is to reduce clutter, and a standard would only provide a jumping-off point for innovations in content treachery. The effectiveness of things like search rankings, ad blockers, and tracking prevention rely on website authors not knowing how they work, or not caring enough to know. Perhaps it’s a good thing that reader modes, an obscure, subtly-broken, and poorly-documented feature, function similarly by pure chance. I can’t imagine any ad-supported websites would be particularly enthusiastic to help browsers show users just what they came for, with no ads, no links to other articles, no comments sections, no social media buttons. Imagine the HTML crimes they’d do to sneak them back in. Imagine the cat-and-mouse game that would ensue. Imagine the ways they’d meddle in the standardization process.

Acceptance

This is not to suggest that a lack of a standard is a good thing, or that it’s a purposeful effort by browser vendors to thwart those who would ruin it for everybody. But I also don’t think the lack of a standard is a bad thing either. Standards are nice to have, but they aren’t strictly necessary, and it seems difficult to create a standard that would benefit users for whom the current implementation is inadequate, but not those for whom a large population of reader mode users would be valuable clickbait targets. Perhaps a solution is possible, but it doesn’t seem trivial, both technically and socially, and it really isn’t such a big deal. The reader mode we’ve got isn’t perfect, but it works. It’ll be our little secret.