Increase Website Readability With TidyRead For Firefox

Internet browsers have not seen many advancements in increasing website readability in the last years. Most web browsers provide access to settings to change the fonts, sizes and colors but that’s about it. The rise of add-ons, userscripts and bookmarklets did what the Internet browsers did not: They provided the means to increase website readability.

TidyRead is a brand new add-on for the Firefox web browser that extracts the main content from a website and displays it in an overlay window on top of the original website. It can do that automatically or manually but more about that later. The window will usually display the title, text and additional information like information about the author, date and comments on the page. It basically strips away all the non-content elements like sidebar links, advertisement or widgets that can break concentration easily.

A total of four different themes are available that use the color schemes white, black, yellow and green. The very same options can be used to increase or decrease the text size on the screen and to change the width of the layout from wide to normal and narrow. There is also an option to print the extracted contents.

The add-on will perform the task automatically by default which can be a bit nerve wrecking after a while. The settings can be changed in the extension’s options so that the process can be initiated manually by clicking on the add-on’s icon in the status bar. It is also possible to create a whitelist and blacklist. Sites that match strings in the whitelist will always be displayed using the add-on while those blacklisted will not.

The default color scheme, font size and margin can be defined in the options as well plus there are settings to disable the add-on for https pages, forums and homepages.

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Tags: firefox, firefox-add on, internet browser, tidyread, web browser, website readability
Categories: Browsing, firefox

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5 Responses to “Increase Website Readability With TidyRead For Firefox”

1. TidyRead says:

   April 28, 2009 at 12:11 am

   Thanks Martin for the reviews and we will keep improving.

   Reply
2. Mike Smith says:

   April 28, 2009 at 12:18 pm

   http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

   The above site has a bookmarklet that does pretty much the same thing. I’ve been using it for a while and I don’t know how I lived without it.

   Reply

Trackbacks/Pingbacks

1. TidyRead renders better readability of Webpages says:

   May 1, 2009 at 7:55 am

   [...] TidyRead Via ghacks.net Tagged with: firefox extensions • [...]

   Reply
2. Blackout Changes Website Color Schemes says:

   August 4, 2009 at 8:35 pm

   [...] Blackout is not the only option to change a color theme on the fly. Other options are the Tidyread add-on for Firefox or the Readability [...]

   Reply
3. Remove Colors And Backgrounds With No Color For Firefox says:

   November 21, 2009 at 6:57 pm

   [...] unreadable pages into readable ones including bookmarklets, Greasemonkey scripts, web proxies and add-ons. One of the latest add-ons to implement this functionality is the No Color add-on for the Firefox [...]

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