Some web pages may be too busy with images and objects, in addition to the text we want to read, or perhaps their experience is not optimized for our mobile phones. There are also those occasions when we want to read an article, news or the content of a web page. in a more pleasant and easy on the eyes interface.
For all these cases, Chrome has an answer: it’s reading mode, and it’s Available for desktop and mobile Android. Activating it is simple and is of great help when we want to read a good article on the Internet without too many distractions.
What is Chrome reading mode for?
As the name suggests, reading mode allows for much more enjoyable reading on any web page, or rather almost any web page, since I found a few that don’t support this function. When activated, the reading experience is completely simplifiedthe text is the protagonist.
Depending on whether we are using it on desktop or mobile, we may or may not see most of the images in an article. For the rest, you can choose the font, the font size and the screen color (even a sepia mode for greater reading comfort), among other configuration options.
How to enable reading mode in Chrome for desktop
Reading mode is available in the Chrome browser on Windows, macOS, and Linux computers. Regardless of the operating system, always activates the same way:
- In the browser, on the web page that we want to view in reading mode, we click on the three-dot button in the upper right corner
- We place the cursor on More tools
- Finally, we continue Reading mode
This will activate reading mode and a new section will open in the right window, in which we can see the same article but in a text version only, thanks to activating the mode.
Of course, we can expand this reading window, even covering the page completely, we can change the font, size and color. It is even possible to deactivate the presence of links in reading mode. Of course, in this mode the images of the article or the videos will not be present, which can pose a problem for the compression of the article if it requires context through images for example.
To close this window, we can click the “X” on the reading mode version of the page. And if we click on the pushpin button, it will be added a quick access button to reading mode in the same bar where access to extensions is located.
How to enable reading mode on Android
Reading mode is not yet available in the final, stable version of Chrome for Android, but there is a way to use it: via the experimental functions of the browser.
Being an experimental feature, it may have some bugs, but in my testing it gave me a good experience on virtually every web page I accessed, with a few exceptions where it simply isn’t possible to activate reading mode. We hope that reading mode will be available in the final version of Chrome in the future, in the meantime To activate it we follow these steps:
- In Chrome for Android we write chrome://flags in the address bar and click “Go”
- In this hidden menu, we write “Drive” in the search bar
- We will configure two options: In “Contextual page actions – reader mode” we change the configuration to “Enabled”. In “Triggering reader mode” we change the configuration to “Always”
- Finally, we press Relaunch to restart the browser and apply the changes
And that’s all. Now, an option will appear on all compatible websites to enable Chrome Reading Mode. If we want to deactivate it, we access the page again and deactivate the options that we had previously configured, or simply press the “Reset all” button to. Chrome disables all experimental features.
Cover photo | Firmbee.com on Unsplash (with editing)
By | The avant-garde
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