1766326 - Feature request: Remember when Reader Mode is set per-site.

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Toolkit :: Reader Mode, enhancement)

Description

[Mike Hoye [:mhoye]]

Right now we remember user-set zoom levels per site, even across reloads and restarts.

Reader Mode is great, and it would be nice if we could remember whether or not it was toggled for sites, with the same degree of permanence, so a site you prefer to read in reader mode stays that way.

Comment 1

[:Gijs (he/him)]

A few notes: doing this on a per-article basis seems useless. You'd want it to be per-site, presumably...

This assumes that the entire site is usable in reader mode, and that normally isn't the case. In particular, on news sites (the "traditional" target of reader mode), the "homepage" with lots of links (and maybe 1-2 sentence blurbs of articles) is not a good fit for reader mode. We avoid offering reader mode for those right now by never offering the reader mode option for root pages (ie no reader mode on https://example.com/, but we offer it on https://example.com/page). This isn't a particularly great model, but it's a reasonable first approximation when it's still up to the user to actually open reader mode or not. It would fall down much harder and more painfully if we automated use of reader mode on the same (availability + history) basis.

So I don't really see how this would work, without a much more sophisticated classification system for whether a page "deserves" reader mode (which isn't the same as "can we render something/anything in reader mode here").

Comment 2

[:Gijs (he/him)]

This is pretty closely related to bug 1311874 which was wontfixed. There are add-ons that have this type of functionality, and I'm not convinced it's all that useful to keep this bug open if we're unlikely to implement within Firefox itself. Micah, thoughts?

Comment 3

[Micah [:mtigley] (she/her)]

Thanks Gijs for your thoughts on this!

It would fall down much harder and more painfully if we automated use of reader mode on the same (availability + history) basis.

I'd be hesitant implementing this feature due to this, unless we spend more time understanding what it looks like when reader mode fails if the user navigates back to a page where its contents may have changed: what happens if it doesn't pass the isReaderable check anymore? Do we remove the route if it no longer exists? How do we effectively communicate this information to the user?

I'd lean towards exploring a route where discoverability of the reader mode icon is more obvious.

Comment 4

[Micah [:mtigley] (she/her)]

I'll close this issue for now given Comment 1 and Comment 3.