1603063 - A Reuters Investigate page should offer reader mode and work correctly

Status: NEW

(Toolkit :: Reader Mode, defect, P3)

Description

[Paul Adenot (:padenot)]

STR (in today's Nightly):

• Load https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-raven-whitehouse/
• Try to use the reader mode

Expected:

• This works

Actual:

• I had the reader mode icon exactly once, and it seemed to have failed
• Forcing it via <about:reader?url=https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-raven-whitehouse/> shows that it didn't pick up the content of the article
• The reader mode is unavailable on mobile

This works well on Safari.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

(In reply to Paul Adenot (:padenot) from comment #0)

• I had the reader mode icon exactly once, and it seemed to have failed

OK. It worked for me, though I scrolled down the page a bit before pressing it (which, given the page, might have added more content or something, which would influence whether or not reader mode succeeds).

I do see that on any subsequent loads, the button no longer shows up, and I'm not entirely sure off-hand why that is. I suspect that it's a result of the content loading asynchronously, and when we check for reader-able content, there might not be any yet (or it might be marked hidden/invisible until the rest of it has loaded).

• Forcing it via <about:reader?url=https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-raven-whitehouse/> shows that it didn't pick up the content of the article

This is because in this mode, we just XHR the HTML, the article is not contained in the markup (you can see if you just view-source the original page), it's fetched asynchronously using JS. bug 1176827 and bug 1166687 are other cases where this causes discrepancies; it's not really clear whether using some kind of hidden browser to load the content is going to be better than XHR all the time and/or is worth rewriting a lot of code for (plus, nobody is actively working on reader mode at the moment, so...).

• The reader mode is unavailable on mobile

I'm not sure if you mean iOS or Android, but unfortunately you'd want to file a separate bug against their projects; I don't know why it wouldn't be available there when it is available on desktop - they use their own bits of logic for this, I think.