Among all the new features introduced in Safari 5, the one that stood out was the Safari Reader. Why? Because perhaps it is one of few innovations that developers of other browsers haven’t yet thought about. All of them are working on improving JavaScript engines, extensions and increasing speeds but Apple is the first one to introduce something as innovative as Safari reader.
In simple terms, what the Safari reader does is that it auto detects the articles within webpages, and pulls them out for simple article only view. This means that you don’t waste your time in figuring out what portion of the webpage is the article and what is the advertising.
How does Safari Reader Work ?
While browsing the web, you visit different type of websites ranging from News websites, Blogs, Social Media Websites to Video Sharing sites like YouTube. Most of these websites are a combination of two things
1. Content – which may be article , blog post , picture or a video and comments on that content
2 . Advertisements – most of the times related to the content.
Whenever you browse a webpage with Safari 5, it detects if you are on a webpage with an article. Now if you click the Safari Reader icon in the Address Bar, it will bring up the article part of the webpage to the front. The article would be displayed with the images, white background and black text. All the pages in the article will be displayed in one flow.
If the article contains video, only the snapshot will be displayed. You cannot play videos in the Reader Mode.
You can also access the on screen controls like Email, Print, and Zoom and changing the font size. To enable on screen controls, simply hover your mouse over the lower center portion of the screen.
Enabling the Safari Reader
Safari Reader will be enabled by default whenever Safari detects you are viewing a webpage with an article. An icon like the following image will appear on the right hand side of the address bar. Click the Reader icon to enable Safari reader.
You can also manually enable the Safari reader. To do this Click on the View tab in Menu Bar and Select Enable reader.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
It is a good one by Apple. I will give them that. The first new browser ‘feature’ in a while that actually does something related to the content on the Web.
I guess it’s innovative for being built into a browser, but you should note that it was built on the popular open source project Readablity, by arc20 labs.
Thanks for the illustrations, which make the enabling of the feature MUCH more clear than anything I found on Safari’s website. However, manual enabling didn’t work!
I clicked “View,” but the option to enter Reader was grayed out. Then I tried the keyboard shortcut, but nothing happened. I definitely was viewing an article, on dallasnews.com, and the Reader functions works just fine on your page. What’s wrong?