696921 - (reader) Implement Reader Mode for phone UI

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Madhava Enros [:madhava]]

We should design and implement a reading mode in the mobile browser.

At the basic end, this could just be a way to pull content out of bad-for-reading pages into something more purpose-built for reading. At the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, it could be a replacement for dealing with a site's own nav system.

Comment 1

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Design Concepts can be found here:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI/UserExperience/ReaderMode

Comment 2

[Mark Finkle (:mfinkle) (use needinfo?)]

(In reply to Patryk Adamczyk (UX) from comment #1)
> Design Concepts can be found here:
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Fennec/NativeUI/UserExperience/ReaderMode

This is a great overview of the feature. I think a hard problem we'll need to figure out to get this working well is:

* What rules do we use to "modify" a webpage to make it work in reading mode?

Each page will have content and images in a different layout. Trying to figure out what is content and what is cruft will be a challenge. Trying to figure out what images are relevant to the text content and which are ads (or other) will be hard too.

We could make some "add-ons" for specific websites, but that won't scale very well. We could have some fallback rules that work in general, but might not work very well.

Comment 3

[Patryk Adamczyk [:patryk] UX]

Here is a link (http://www.readability.com/publishers/guidelines/) on readability.com to article publishing guidelines which could be a good start on setting rules for what gets converted into a more readable format. Its using the hNews spec.

Comment 4

[Matt Brubeck (:mbrubeck)]

To extract the text content from web sites, my "Reading List" add-on for XUL Fennec uses code from the original Readability bookmarklet, which was released under the Apache 2.0 license.

Comment 5

[Lucas Rocha (:lucasr)]

Turning this bug into a meta bug.

Comment 6

[Paul [pwd]]

It took me far too long to work out how to use this feature. Is there any chance we can get a popup or open a page that explains these pages are added to the bookmarks?

Comment 7

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Paul, what were the pain points for you?
Thanks
Ian

Comment 8

[Paul [pwd]]

Just figuring out how to find the reader and read things via it. It's not a very intuitive experience for me. The last place I looked was where I found it (bookmarks). I would've been nice if something said "Items added to your reading list can be found in a more reading friendly format via your bookmarks". Also you should be able to remove and/or save reading position of things via the about:reader UI.

Comment 9

[Ian Barlow (:ibarlow)]

Yep, these are all things in the pipeline that are coming soon

* Exposing the reading list more clearly to the user
* Next / Prev controls for Navigating through articles in the reading list 
* Removing items from the list

Stay tuned :)

Comment 10

[Paul [pwd]]

Is there anyway to hide the icon in the URL bar?

Comment 11

[Kevin Ernst]

Perhaps a comment here about "hey, look what they (iOS developers) are doing over there" would not be appreciated here. But responses from Fennec developers on the recent Reddit IAmA (http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/vkwjz/iama_significant_portion_of_the_firefox_for/) have emboldened me to make this recommendation:

I cannot emphasize enough how sublime Tweetbot's "reader mode" and offline reading features are, although it capitalizes on integration with third-party services like Instapaper (a Fennec feature request in itself). No other iOS app I know of, with the possible exception of Reeder by Silvio Rizzi, even comes close. Tweetbot's mobile/offline reading workflow is very, very worthy of emulating in Fennec.

If you've never used Tweetbot (or Reader), please consider borrowing a friend's iPhone and having a look at the long-press functionality (see also bug #769374) and the mobilizer "switch" in the toolbar of the baked-in browser.

Comment 12

[Aaron Train [:aaronmt]]

This doesn't still need sec-review now does it? I think this bug can be resolved.

Comment 13

[Mark Goodwin [:mgoodwin]]

(In reply to Aaron Train [:aaronmt] from comment #12)
> This doesn't still need sec-review now does it? I think this bug can be
> resolved.

No, this has been done: see bug 785077.

Comment 14

[Kevin Brosnan [Ex-Mozilla]]

This bug was done for Firefox 14.