1223581 - Reader View omits usernames on Hacker News comment pages

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: Reader View, defect)

Description

[csims460]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/46.0.2490.80 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

1. Visit a comment page on news.ycombinator.com (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10542023)
2. Add the page to your Reading List so you can read it later while offline.
3. While offline, view the item in your reading list.




Actual results:

The page is unreadable because usernames are missing, so you can't tell who said what. If you try to disable Reader View to get the normal "Web view", you can't because you're offline and it didn't get saved.


Expected results:

Either 1 or 2:
1. The page includes usernames in Reader View and is thus readable.
2. The normal "Web view" is also saved, so that you can turn Reader View off while offline and still see a saved version of the page.

2 is ultimately a better fix because it will provide a usable fix for any other sites that don't render well in Reader View. It is also what Pocket does.

Comment 1

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

Issues for the parser go to the GH repo https://github.com/mozilla/readability/. However I don't know that parsing forums is an intended use case. There is not a central body to the page.

Comment 2

[csims460]

Thanks for the link - I think you're right about it not being an intended use case for the parser (see https://github.com/mozilla/readability/issues/124). And it makes sense, since there's not much reason to use Reader View on comment pages on sites like Hacker News, Reddit, etc, except to get them stored offline on your Reading List.

I think the core issue is that we have a Reading List that stores the list of web pages you want to read later, but when you're offline the only ones you can read later are the articles that render properly in Reader View. If the web page you wanted to read later wasn't an article, it probably won't render correctly and you therefore can't read it later while offline.

I think the solution to this is the "2" that I alluded to in my previous comment - we should save the original web page so that users can view all web pages on their Reading List while offline. Should I create a new bug for this, and close this one? Although in a way it's more of a feature request than a bug.

Comment 3

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

As there is a issue on file with the GitHub project closing this out. Not really an enhancement, more of a minor issue with the parser.