Chrome’s Reader Mode May be Coming to Custom Tabs in a Future Update

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Google is constantly working to improve the user experience of websites on a mobile device. Not only have they made a lot of progress with their AMP project, but they’re even working to help the user take control of the content being displayed on their device. This type of work can also be shown dating all the way back to 2014 when the company debuted a Reader Mode to version 39 of their Chrome for Android beta update via the Play Store.

A lot of websites have shifted to a responsive web design to improve the user experience on a mobile device, but sometimes this isn’t enough. These pages can still be bogged down with ads, poorly formatted due to the screen size of your device, and just a horrible experience for the end user. It can be difficult to trigger this on Android due to how the hidden settings are laid out. But if you visit chrome://flags and search for “reader”, then you can change the way it prompts you to enable the feature.

The goal here is to remove the fluff and most of the formatting so that it’s simple and easy to read content on a mobile device. Enabling this for an article on a website will extract things such as the title, images and unrelated text so only the important elements can be displayed to you. As it is right now, Reader Mode in Chrome for Android is only available in a regular Chrome tab, but this could be changing in the future as it looks like work is being done to enable it in a Chrome Custom Tab as well

We found this commit in Gerrit for Chromium that talks about Reader Mode for a Chrome Custom Tab. This doesn’t exactly mean the feature will make it in a future update, but it does show that Google is working on it. So if things work out and it performs well, we could see it implemented on what is considered to be a ‘high-end device.”