Safari reader: pretty useful

Some time ago Apple updated it’s Webkit based browser Safari to version five and made two major additions to it. It added long awaited extensions and a very useful other feature named Reader.

The Safari reader functionality aims to make long articles on the web easier and more fun to read. It does this by only displaying the essence of the article, that is, the text and related media such as images and video. It displays this in a way that resembles paper, around the edges of the paper you can see the original website dimmed down so you can focus on the article. I find this very useful because on normal webpages I tend to get distracted by ads, menus and what have you. By clicking the little Reader button in the address-bar, this all disappears.

Safari Reader in action on NY Times website

Now the question is, how does Safari detect where to display the reader button and which part of the website is the actual article. I can tell you from my experience that it does both things quite well. Though it sometimes doesn’t display the reader button when an article is there, it does so most of the time and it always picks the right content to display. Over at the Dutch forums of onemorething.nl I asked members how this worked and got a pretty good answer.

PS: You can also use the reader function on my blog when viewing a blogpost on its dedicated page, try it out!

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