1295304 - Reader Mode should support read: prefix

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Reader Mode, defect, P4)

Description

[brandon.clinger]

Attachment: reader_view.PNG

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:50.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/50.0
Build ID: 20160815004002

Steps to reproduce:

Attempt to open a page with the read: prefix. Example read:https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2016/08/02/exciting-improvements-in-firefox-for-desktop-and-android/


Actual results:

Windows 10 prompted me asking which application I would like to open this content. Windows 10 suggested Microsoft Edge, which does support the read: prefix.


Expected results:

Mozilla Firefox should provide some capability to enter the reader view based on a URI input. Suggest adopting what is used by default in Windows 10, read:

Comment 1

[Tooru Fujisawa [:arai]]

what application generates the URL with "read:" ?
is there any spec for it?

Comment 2

[mark.noble]

(In reply to Tooru Fujisawa [:arai] from comment #1)
> what application generates the URL with "read:" ?
> is there any spec for it?

As documented in the initial story, Microsoft Edge provides these URI's prefaced with "read:" to allow users to share website content with others while bypassing ads and other irrelevant content.

The spec documenting URI's (as opposed to URL's) in the general sense can be found here: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3986

Comment 3

[Jared Wein [:jaws] (please needinfo? me)]

Dolske, do you think we should add support for this. It would be good to support links that are shared from Edge's reader mode, but on the other hand Firefox goes out of its way to hide the special URL for the reader view of pages.

If we support this protocol, we should probably start showing the same 'read:' protocol in the address bar of Reader View of Firefox.

Comment 4

[Justin Dolske [:Dolske]]

I think there are a few issues here:

1) Should Firefox support opening / clicking "read:" links?

2) Should Firefox register itself as a handler for "read:" with Windows?

3) Should Firefox's Reader View show the "read:" format in the URL bar


I'm not really thrilled with MS creating a new protocol for sharing pages in reader-view, since it means such links break in every browser that doesn't support it. See also everyone's favorite annoyance of URLs that are desktop or mobile specific, instead of a common URL + responsive design. I'm also a bit wary of there being lurking security bugs in implementing this right, e.g. around same-originness.

But for 1 & 2, I suppose we could support this if users are expecting this to work. I'm not sure if there's any particular urgency in doing so, though. How long has Edge been doing this? Might be useful to see what our platform/standards people think about this. Chrome doesn't support it, at least right now.

Another option might be to just handle these with urifixup, and basically treat "read:http" as a typo for "http".

I don't think we should do #3, for the reasons above.