Firefox "Reader Mode" and NoScript (Shallow Thoughts)

Firefox "Reader Mode" and NoScript

A couple of days ago I blogged about using Firefox's "Delete Node" to make web pages more readable. In a subsequent Twitter discussion someone pointed out that if the goal is to make a web page's content clearer, Firefox's relatively new "Reader Mode" might be a better way.

I knew about Reader Mode but hadn't used it. It only shows up on some pages. as a little "open book" icon to the right of the URLbar just left of the Refresh/Stop button. It did show up on the Pogue Yahoo article; but when I clicked it, I just got a big blank page with an icon of a circle with a horizontal dash; no text.

It turns out that to see Reader Mode content in noscript, you must explicitly enable javascript from about:reader.

There are some reasons it's not automatically whitelisted: see discussions in bug 1158071 and bug 1166455 -- so enable it at your own risk. But it's nice to be able to use Reader Mode, and I'm glad the Twitter discussion spurred me to figure out why it wasn't working.