Google Chrome for desktop is finally adding a reader mode

While Google Chrome is the most popular web browser in the world, it has always lacked some useful features. In fact, one of the biggest factors of its popularity is that it just works. There are some features that other browsers have had for years, but Google has been lagging behind. One good example is the reader mode. It is good for long-night sessions, or while trying to read something from a website which is full of ads, auto-playing videos, JavaScript scripts, pop-ups, and other horrible things. The reading mode gets rid of all of this content and focuses on what actually matters, like the headline, article content, and images. ZDNet found out that reading mode will be a part of Google Chrome soon.

The feature is already live in today’s Chrome Canary build. You can start using reader mode by downloading Chrome Canary, navigating to chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode, enabling the selected flag, and relaunching Chrome by clicking on the button at the bottom. In the screenshot below, you can see how an article on our own website looks after enabling the reader mode. As I mentioned, it focuses on the actual content of the website. You can toggle the reader mode by clicking on the Chrome dropdown menu (three dots at the top right corner) and selecting “Distill page.”

As of this time, we have no idea when this feature will make it into the beta or the stable channel of Google Chrome. Keep in mind this is the alpha version of the reading mode and it may or may not change in the future. To be honest, I’m quite surprised by the feature, as it is fairly stable and transforms the website in the blink of an eye. This kind of performance makes me believe that we may see reading mode in the stable version of Google Chrome very soon.