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FireFox Mobile Updated With New Distraction-Free Reading Mode

Mozilla rolled out a new update to the Firefox web browser this week. (Actually, they released 2 updates; the second update came out today and fixed a security hole which was discovered in the first update.)

Firefox 16 has a whole bunch of new features but one in particular caught my eye. It now has a Reader Mode which extracts the contents of  web page (article text and images) and lets you read them sans ads or other distractions.

I just tried it on my Samsung Galaxy Tab and it was surprisingly fast considering that it was running on a single core CPU. It’s difficult to see in the photo at right, but this new mode strips out the article title as well as the image formatting. That’s fine for most things but it is also liable to gunk up the more complicated article layouts.

But this will still be useful for keeping up on the news while mobile. I am a heavy user of Google Reader, but I don’t always like it when a blog post references an article on some website. That website probably won’t be easy or pleasant to read on a 7″ screen, though I will usually read the article anyway. But thanks to this new Reader Mode  in FF 16 I shouldn’t have that problem anymore.

Now if only I could get it on my Kindle Fire HD…

You can find the app in Google Play, and you can enter the Reader Mode  by clicking on the icon next to the URL in the Firefox browser bar.

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Comments


Hayden October 12, 2012 um 2:36 am

Love the guys at Mozilla. They just keep doing great work and give it to us for free


Episode 117 – What About Bob? » Android Buffet Podcast October 15, 2012 um 11:56 pm

[…] Mobile updated with distraction-free reading […]


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