Fed up playing “find the article” on Websites that are drowning in advertising, links to other content, and poor design? Then you’re going to love the new “Reading Mode” feature in Google Chrome…
Imagine a Web where there are no advertisements at all and where sites have their articles or other content front and center. No clutter, no confusion about having to scroll to continue reading, just content, lots of great content. Well, that’s not exactly the Worldwide Web we have in 2024 so we’ve all had to learn how to navigate sites and identify the actual content we seek. Changes are afoot, however, one of which is through AI: You can ask Google Gemini or Microsoft Copilot to “summarize the content of this page” and let it do the work.
If you’re not ready to trust software apps to understand material you want to read, or just enjoy reading, Google’s just introduced a wonderful new feature in Chrome 125.0.6422.1 (you can just look for the first number, everything else is just version tracking): Reading Mode. To learn more about this, you’ll need to start by ensuring you have the latest version of Chrome too. The easiest is to go here: ••• > Help > About Google Chrome.
FINDING READING MODE IN CHROME
A typical Web site that demonstrates the challenge of finding actual content when there are a lot of ads and other visual clutter is MSN.com. Consider this article on top fantasy novels:
There’s a headline and a first paragraph, but everything else on the page is clutter that makes it more difficult to read and understand the actual story. But now there’s a solution! Right-click anywhere that’s blank on the page and check out what’s in the context menu:
It’s even flagged as NEW: “Open in Reading Mode“. Before we do that, however, there’s a second way to get to this too, in case you’re ever on a page that doesn’t have any blank space (!!)…
As you can see, the path is ••• > More Tools > Reading Mode. Choose it.
OPTIMIZING CHROME READING MODE
A sidebar opens up with just the text (or as best as Chrome can manage):
What really makes Reading Mode helpful is that you can customize its text presentation in a way that you can’t change Webpage design and layout. For example, it’s using the default typeface of “Poppins”, but click on that and you can change to a preferred alternative:
Much more useful, however, is that you can change the size of the type, the line spacing, even the theme:
In fact, I’ll make the typeface a bit bigger, increase line spacing, switch to the Yellow theme, then click and drag the divider to make the Reading Mode area bigger:
The margins are kinda wacky, so I expect that’ll be something adjustable in the next iteration of this feature, but this display is sooooo much more readable than the original page. No ads (well, the Lenovo link is the remnant of an advertisement, but it’s far easier to ignore), just the article. If the article has associated photos, those should show up too, something that will also improve as the Chrome dev team get feedback from users.
And that’s it. Reading Mode is a great win. And, a tip: Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari have both had a similar feature for quite a while now. I use it quite a bit in Edge when I’m not asking Copilot to summarize content!
Pro Tip: I’ve been writing about Google tools forever! Please check out my extensive Google Chrome and Tools help area while you’re here! Thanks.