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Meanwhile, in firefox 39a (current nightly), a reader view (readability/printfriendly)

http://imgur.com/DONqb30




About time! I've been using it a lot on FF mobile where it's super useful. This feature was announced long time ago. I've been using the Enjoy Reading extension for a while and found no good replacement when it was abandoned.


For desktop I use the Readability Bookmarklet[1]. Gets the job done.

[1]https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/


I use Evernote's Readly. Quite lovely, but the customization isn't the best compared to Readability.

I prefer having an extension/built-in tool to a bookmarklet, though.


Personally I use a Firefox keyword shortcut to printfriendly (I don't remember why I stopped using readability, it's a lot fancier, but PF never failed so I kept going back to it.)


Yes, plus you can send the extracted articles directly to the kindle.


Why's that added to the main program, though? I mean, there's extensions that do the same thing, right?

(I'm sure others have made similar remarks about other features that were added over time that were originally in extensions)


I seem to recall that Readability required transmitting the page I was viewing to their servers, so I found myself avoiding it. I don't know if there were good alternatives, but I do have faith that Mozilla's will be good (although I haven't tried the nightly or anything), so I'm excited about that. Once I used it for a while, it felt like something a browser should just have.


We've put the source we're using up on github ( https://github.com/mozilla/readability ) and plan to use the same library on all platforms. Any contributions are welcome.


Good point, also useful in and out of itself without being out of place (much less than webrtc audio chat)


How did you enable this? I'm on 39 as well and I can't find the option?


Enable 'reader.parse-on-load.enabled' in about:config


Here's what I did : absolutely nothing.

A little icon appeared in the url bar on some website (it's orange when reader view is active, otherwise it's pale blue). I don't know how or why Firefox decides to show this icon. Even better, I just revisited the webpage in the screenshot annnd... no more reader view icon. SoFTWare.

ps: the reader view icon doesn't show anymore. FTWustrating.


Maybe I can stop zooming all the way in all the time soon :)


speaking of zooming, and if any Moz devs are watching, please finally fix radio and checkbox control zooming. it's been 7.5 years.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400364


What? You don't like the challenge of trying to click on a micron wide checkbox on your new 4k laptop screen? That's half the fun, I say.


In many cases, I use a fontawesome glyph linked to a hidden <input> element to work around this limitation :(


On a 4k screen I find that setting layout.css.devPixelsPerPx to ~2 works better than zooming.


yeah, but that doesn't make checkboxes any bigger either.


Good shout, this seems like a pretty major accessibility bug, bit saddened that as a professional web dev I wasn't aware of it, otherwise I probably would've been applying a standard workaround like @sarciszewski.


A similar feature has been available on mobile FF fore a while now and I use it pretty regularly.


What OS is this? Or what user interface?


Looks to be Arch running i3 (my own current setup as well, actually)


Looks like Linux with Openbox: http://openbox.org/wiki/Openbox:Screenshots


I doubt that's Openbox. It would be one of the many tiling / dynamic WM's out there (DWM, Awesome, i3, Xnomad, etc).

As for which WM specifically, it would be impossible to say for certainty since every one of them can be configured to look like the other - so only the OP would know for sure.

I'd speculate that you're right about Linux, but only because the article exampled was about ArchLinux. However that could be a red herring and the aforementioned WMs would also compile on most modern *nixes (or at the very least, a few of the notable BSDs)


archlinux (you could have guessed from the page shown;), wmii as WM, no customizations whatsoever.


Obviously false. They could not guess from the screenshot.


I did customize wmii default theme colour too. Twice falsified.


It's a shame that the "readable" mode has #333 body text instead of #000.


http://ianstormtaylor.com/design-tip-never-use-black/


That is poor advice which doesn't account for the difference between computer screens and ink on paper. The deepest black you can get on a monitor will not be as dark as certain inks on a page.


I'd argue that it does account for that difference, just not in an immediately obvious way. Screen displays are an additive color model and print is a subtractive one; screens shine light at you, paper has light shined on it. This makes for a very different perceptual feel; (completely) black ink on white paper is way less "contrasty" than #000 text on an #FFF background. WCAG accessibility guidelines suggest a minimum contrast ratio of 7:1 luminosity -- #000 on #FFF is a 21:1 contrast ratio!

In practice, I think we'd be better off darkening the background a little and lightening the foreground just a touch; #333 text on #F8F8F8 background still "feels" like black and white, but (assuming you've chosen a reasonable text size) it'll be a lot easier to read if you're dealing with long-form text.


I find it difficult to believe that the relative difference between #F8F8F8 and #FFFFFF matters at all relative to the the widely varying screen brightness settings on everyone's very different computers, tablets and phones in very different lighting conditions.


It's (generally) bad 'design' to fill areas with black, sure- but #000 outlines and text is just getting proper use of the limited dynamic range we're provided with.


#000 needs to be used tastefully, otherwise it can be visually overbearing.


Do you find this page visually overbearing because all of the non-downvoted comments are #000? I have never seen a page of text on a computer screen look overbearing because its color was #000 and not lighter.


What stands out more? The comments, or the names of those who comment?

Experiment, write this css into your dev tools:

    body * {
      color: #000 !important;
    }


No, but I probably would if the background were white.


Why?


#000 is easier to read on devices with that have dim backlights.


I see font rendering in linux is still pretty horrible.


You know, you might be looking at a screenshot that has font settings (hinting etc) which work on the originating display and fail on yours. No reason to jump to snarkiness.


You do realize the screenshot is an image right?


That doesn't matter. The pixel output of subpixel rendering only works on monitors with the pixel layout it's intended for.


whoa, that is something i never thought about before.


Take a screenshot and zoom in on text, chances are that you will see lots of subtly colored pixels around it.


Yes, but font hinting takes advantage of the specific subpixel layout of your LCD (e.g is the order RGB left-to-right, top-to-bottom, two greens and forming a square, etc). If you take a screenshot and look at it on another monitor, it's quite possible for it to look awful because your RGB subpixel layout and the source differ.


Don't be so quick my dear, sometimes screenshots differ dramatically from what the user sees.


Yes, a JPEG image :)


Font rendering is as configured. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration


Yeah, I know you can make fonts look nice in linux, but distros ship with horrible defaults.


First, who do you think you are to question my font configuration skills (hint: nil), second, as mentioned earlier, there are ways to have 'better' font rendering. The thing is it requires a PhD in Linux display stack and frankly I don't care. I tried to care though, and it backfired at me (emacs was fubared, and that's a deal breaker), and this default config, even subpar, is pretty enough and stable enough. Lastly, chromium manages to set up itself better and fonts look better in it. SoFTWare.


> there are ways to have 'better' font rendering. The thing is it requires a PhD in Linux display stack

Not really. Just learning about how to adjust preferences for FontConfig. Antialiasing, hinting and subpixel rendering have a lot of effect on the visual appearance especially. You can read about it here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Font...

There can be also some monitor specific tweaks like LCD filtering.

More feature rich DEs give quite easy to use interfaces for managing all that (for example KDE). So if you are using some barebones DE / WM, then you should be ready to do all that manually in the config files.


I did try arch wiki advices, I got some results but I didn't really understand what I was doing and had lots of undesired side-effects (emacs buffer redraw failed, screenshot aliasing failed,...) so I dropped everything and used stock config.

The xml config files seems overly complex (I admit, I suffer from acute xml ad-formatem) for my tastes.

I tried to diff manjaro linux /etc/fontconfig actually, just to see what they were doing right to have such nice visuals and couldn't find anything.

It's in the same basket as some famous audio server, which I replaced by it's very naive ancestor.


On Debian defaults are all under /etc/fonts

About general idea of what all those settings are, here is a brief overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization

FontConfig rules can even be applied to Web fonts, which at times can be messed up by default. Example of such rule for fixing some mess on DuckDuckGo:

    <match target="font">
      <test name="family">
        <string>@font-face:DDG_ProximaNova</string>
      </test>
      <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
        <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
        <const>lcddefault</const>
      </edit>
    </match>
The difference it made for me (note the word Wikipedia and messed up letter i):

Without the rule: https://i.imgur.com/SsicEFJ.png

With the rule: https://i.imgur.com/Ehh0rZU.png


I didn't know this worked against web fonts as well. Is there any chance you could share your webfonts config in its entirety? Maybe post it on github or some whee? I'd be hugely grateful :)


That's really the only such setting that I have :) I use DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine and that messed up i was irritating me a lot, so I was digging for a way to improve the look of Web fonts and discovered that Fontconfig can affect them.


Thank you, I appreciate the time you took for the screenshots.


" The thing is it requires a PhD in Linux display stack "

agreed ;)


>distros ship with horrible defaults.

I guess you haven't used Ubuntu lately, which ships with better fonts than my Windows machine.


Or, you know, people have different subjective preferences in fonts.


From another comment:

Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...


Yes, to me, Ubuntu has the best defaults.


Fonts configuration is always rather subjective. I often don't like defaults. This applies to any system. Good ones allow greater flexibility. Bad ones assume they know best and force "best defaults" without any way to improve them.


Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...


Firefox renders text using whatever text rendering settings you have set up on your computer. These differ from platform to platform, and from monitor to monitor. If you don't like sub-pixel rendering, you just turn it off and all the programs on your machine, Firefox included, stop using it.

Others have also mentioned that the subpixel order differs from monitor to monitor, so if the screenshot was taken on a monitor with BGR subpixels and your monitor has RGB subpixels, the text will look much, much, worse than if there had been no subpixel rendering at all. Or perhaps you, like me, have a CRT and subpixel rendering always looks wrong. It's hardly Firefox's fault.


Not sure about that system. I'm using Debian testing and it has very good quality defaults (visually) which I change anyway to suit some of my preferences. So the claim about that "distros ship horrible defaults" is not universally applicable.


I don't see anything wrong with the font rendering on that.


Perhaps you could be more specific?


I was going to saw the same thing, but didn't because I figured I'd get downvoted for it on HN. Seems I was right.

I use debian and arch with http://www.infinality.net/blog/ and the fonts have never looked better.




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