The new feature called Narrate in Mozilla Firefox helps you read out the text on web pages aloud so that you do not have to put strain on your eyes. If you use this feature to make Firefox read the texts in various web pages, then you also have to consider about the privacy of everyone else around you. You can either use a headphone to limit the read out audio to your own ears or you can just refrain from using this narrate feature altogether. You can also go a step further and disable the narrate feature in Firefox. Here is how:
- Launch Firefox browser, type about:config in the address bar and press the Enter key.
- You will be shown a warning message, you can click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button to continue.
- Type in narrate in the search field and locate the setting named narrate.enabled.
- Double-click on the narrate.enabled setting to change its value to false to disable the narrate feature.
- Now you can open any web page, switch to the reader view mode and you won’t see the narrate function anymore.
Later if you want to re-enable the Narrate feature, then you can change back the value of narrate.enabled to true and it will be instantly enabled. You do not have to restart the web browser or anything.
The narrate feature is really helpful to go through those lengthy text based web pages especially if you are a student and you have to read some educational text material quickly. But keep in mind that you should not make Firefox read the text out aloud if others around you get disturbed by it. You can use some headphones to keep the reading sessions private and if necessary in certain places, disable the narrate feature altogether.