Hellllooo Mozilla Connect! We want to thank those folks (2,852 of you!) who participated in the Firefox User Research survey on feature priorities we posted here last month. If you recall, this survey showed participants multiple sets of 3 random browser features, then had participants pick whether...
Me, it makes me a bit sad it’s so low. Reader Mode is one the really cool features of Firefox, but I understand that consuming web content by reading is rapidly on the decline, as a result of the comparatively low information density of video and audio allowing bigger ad space compared to text.
Plus we know from the last 10-15 years how much reading comprehension has nosedived since the proliferation of video content.
What reader mode needs is a (possibly crowdsourced) setting to be the default view on a per-site basis. (I say this because my main problem with it is forgetting it exists and failing to toggle it on.)
To be fair, I imagine an entire browser just like that for a long time. You have your settings and every website would look the same. A default frontend for everything. No Javascript, just the content.
Ah, yes, the Web as it was intended to be, with semantic markup and separate presentation/styling that the user was not only able, but encouraged by design, to override as he saw fit.
I’ve spent pretty much my entire adulthood being low-key pissed off about how that got thoroughly and comprehensively fucked as soon as the marketing fuckwads got their hands on the Web.
Me, it makes me a bit sad it’s so low. Reader Mode is one the really cool features of Firefox, but I understand that consuming web content by reading is rapidly on the decline, as a result of the comparatively low information density of video and audio allowing bigger ad space compared to text.
Plus we know from the last 10-15 years how much reading comprehension has nosedived since the proliferation of video content.
Note that this is the “top 10 features” from the survey. So it’s ranked 10 of some larger number, not last place.
Ironic
What reader mode needs is a (possibly crowdsourced) setting to be the default view on a per-site basis. (I say this because my main problem with it is forgetting it exists and failing to toggle it on.)
To be fair, I imagine an entire browser just like that for a long time. You have your settings and every website would look the same. A default frontend for everything. No Javascript, just the content.
Ah, yes, the Web as it was intended to be, with semantic markup and separate presentation/styling that the user was not only able, but encouraged by design, to override as he saw fit.
I’ve spent pretty much my entire adulthood being low-key pissed off about how that got thoroughly and comprehensively fucked as soon as the marketing fuckwads got their hands on the Web.
Yeah that’s true, or at least I wish I could make FF remember my settings.