SpeedReader will eliminate unnecessary content before a page loads

It has the potential to improve performance by up to 27x

SpeedReader achieves dramatic privacy improvements

27x Performance

The Brave Web Browser (BAT) has unveiled a new browser tool that makes reading on the web a pleasant and hassle-free experience. The SpeedReader will enhance speeds by eliminating unnecessary content before a page loads.

According to November 15, 2018, announcement, the SpeedReader is the brainchild of Andrius Aucinas (Performance Researcher), Peter Snyder (Privacy Researcher), and Dr. Ben Livshits (Chief Scientist), and Mohammad Ghasemisharif, a computer science Ph.D. student from the University of Illinois at Chicago doing his internship at the Brave.

The report shows that SpeedReader has the potential to improve performance by up to 27X, save bandwidth on the order of 84X and enhance privacy issues by completely removing those annoying ad and tracking requests. The tool is also reported to be useful on “22 percent of web pages in general” besides offering better applicability for shared content.

While the modern web has developed and now has a media-rich experience and dynamic applications, the growth has brought with it “page bloat” that makes pages expensive to load with lots of tracking and advertising. The result has been a bad experience for readers that also deny publishers and web developers any documentation.

Readers on the web no longer have a guarantee of what to expect when they press a button. That oscillates between neat and clean articles they intended to read or a high “junk-to-content ratio,” or unexpected articles. Worse still is the new trend of showing tens of privacy/GDRP/cookie screens instead of the article you intended to read.

The user experience is made worse since most developers lack the required information to make websites display properly in reading mode so that readers are left guessing whether an important part of the text has been omitted when reading in reader mode.

Say Goodbye to Irrelevant Content

While reader modes try to make reading pleasant, they have no way of removing junk leading to “page bloat.” The SpeedReader will address these issues, the report says:

“SpeedReader is a new approach to reader modes. It delivers huge improvements to not only the aesthetics of the browsing experience but to browsing performance and privacy as well.”

Reading mode is a web rendering mode that lets the browser eliminate repetitive and irrelevant content like page navigation, distractions, and ads by extracting the main article and displaying it in a clean and consistent page design without littering the page. SpeedReader eliminates third parties, reduces scripts and eliminates ad tracking. The report says: