Slashdot reported a couple of days ago that the upcoming versions of Google Chrome have a new feature that is similar to the reader mode in Firefox. Using this feature you can make any website easy to read. This reader mode removes all the images, animations, stylesheets and other elements from a webpage – leaving only plain text behind which is not only easy to read but also turns it into a format that is easy on your printer.
As of now, this reader mode is available only in Google Chrome Canary as an experimental feature. But later it will be available in the final release version too. If you want to try this reader mode right now (April 2019) then you will have to visit https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/ and install Chrome Canary on your PC. We tested this feature to be working in the version 76.0.3771.0 of Google Chrome Canary web browser.
Here is how you can enable reader mode in Google Chrome:
- Launch Chrome browser and enter chrome://flags in the address bar.
- Type for reader in the search box to look for the experimental feature we want.
- For the feature Enable Reader Mode, set the status to Enabled.
- When the Relaunch Now button appears, click on it to restart the Chrome browser.
- Now try visiting a website and if you want to use the reader mode, click on the Chrome menu (three dots in upper-right corner) and select Distill Page from the menu. This will show you a very simplified version of the current webpage without any images, any media or custom fonts.
If you want to go back to the regular view of that webpage, then you can simple click on the “back” button to go back in the history. You can also press the back button on the keyboard to go back to the original web page.