Added by Soren Stoutner about 7 years ago. Updated about 1 year ago.
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Description
Add a reading mode, that reformats the webpage to display only the body text. This will likely be a time consuming feature to implement unless Google adds it to `WebView`.
In Android < 4.4, the WebView was based on WebKit. It included two layout options (WebSettings.LayoutAlgorithm.NARROW_COLUMNS and WebSettings.LayoutAlgorithm.SINGLE_COLUMN) that were used to reformat the page for reading mode.
https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebSettings.LayoutAlgorithm.html
When WebView was rebased on Blink to share the same codebase as Chromium in Android 4.4 these layout options were removed.
https://developer.android.com/guide/webapps/migrating.html#Columns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blink_(web_engine)
Three is currently no easy way to do a reader mode using WebView. Perhaps it will be something that can be added in Privacy WebView, but it will likely require a bunch of work.
If Google doesn't decide to expose this feature in WebView, it should be fairly simple to enable it in Privacy WebView because the code is already included in the source.
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/04/18/1558246/google-chrome-to-get-a-reader-mode
This is a similar issue with Text only mode. Just implement that & no need of this.
Moreover, if you use feed readers (rss, atom, etc), they also contain images as a part of feed, which negates the whole point of "text only".
Good catch. https://redmine.stoutner.com/issues/530 is a duplicate of this feature request and has been closed as such.
@Prince Cooper, both aren't the same. Reader Mode is an interpretation mechanism where the body text is primarily focused leaving the rest of the functions and CSS jargon. Whereas text only mode is a rendering layout where all the site functions compiled and printed only in the text form.
If you wanna taste some of its experience, try lynx browser on any Linux.
Reader Mode doesn't necessarily improve the performance, as you're still parsing the whole site including JS. But text mode omits everything & just prints the html (which is mostly useless for the current internet).
@Soren Stoutner I think google probably won't implement it in anytime. The codebase exists in chromium outside webview, under Accessibilities. It's not designed to be permanent, caz web is volatile and changes everyday.