Reader Mode for desktop Firefox may be here in 16 weeks
3 September, 2012 § 11 Comments
This past week started the beginning of another semester-long student project. You may remember that in Spring 2012, there was a similar project to implement in-content preferences for Firefox. There is still a little bit more work to do for in-content preferences, but it’s not too far away from being enabled by default in our Nightly builds [1].
This semester there will be four students from Michigan State University working on implementing a Reader Mode for desktop Firefox. Firefox for Android has a Reader Mode, and it’s something we’d like to bring to the desktop now.
Reader Mode is about bringing a smooth and beautiful reading experience to Firefox Mobile. It removes all the clutter from web pages and shows you only what you want to read in a minimalist UI.
Lucas Rocha of the Firefox for Android team is helping mentor the project with me. I’m very excited to have Lucas’ help, as he implemented Reader Mode once already and will bring to the table his valuable experience. Lucas is also very active in the community, helping new contributors get involved with Mozilla.
I plan to post weekly updates on the progress of the work that the students are doing. The project is running from 29 August to 5 December.
[1] The current work to bring the in-content preferences user interface up to par is being tracked in bug 754344.
JAWS 
Readability’s “sepia” style is really good. The Cambria type looks good with and without DirectWrite (i.e. on Chrome, IE9/10, FF with D2D/DW on or off).
@dbcooper, For now, we’re using OpenSans. The long-term plan is offer more options though. We’re currently looking for fonts to ship with Firefox to be used in Reader Mode (among other things). Thanks for the suggestions anyway 🙂
I’m currently working on several sites and I won’t be able to test on mobile Firefox’s reading mode until there are x86 builds available.
Do you have any reference material or suggestions beyond “follow the Readability Article Publishing Guidelines” for making my sites cooperate with reading mode as smoothly as possible?
…and, apparently, if you forget to check “Notify me of follow-up comments via email”, the only way to change your mind is to post another comment. Feel free to moderate this away.
@Stephan, The algorithm used to extract the readable content from pages uses some fuzzy heuristics and will do the Right Thing™ for most pages—even for pages that don’t follow these guidelines.
With that said, following the guidelines will definitely increase the chances of getting the proper content in Reader Mode for your pages.
I hope that answers your question.
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Hello @Lucas,
I am AMO Editor and author of Reader add-on.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/reader/
Let me know if you need any help on the project.
Regards,
Baris Derin
It is end of year 2013 and reader mode for desktop firefox nowhere. Where is the problem?
Still a bit of work to do and nobody is working on it now. There is a chance that the work that was done to port it to Firefox for Windows Metro will make it easier for desktop Firefox to get it.