Reader Mode - Distraction Free Reading

Reader Mode strips a web page down to the article and nothing else. One click on the toolbar icon, or Alt+Shift+R, and the ads, sidebars, cookie banners, share widgets and newsletter popups are gone. Press Esc and the page comes back exactly as it was, scrolled to where you left it. ONE KEYSTROKE Alt+Shift+R opens and closes the reader. The shortcut can be changed from chrome://extensions/shortcuts. Nothing runs on a page until you activate it. READ THE WAY YOU LIKE - Three themes: light, sepia and dark. - Three typefaces: serif, sans serif and monospace. - Font size from 14 to 30 pixels. - Three column widths, from a narrow book column to a wide one. - Adjustable line spacing. Every setting is remembered for the next page, and travels to your other computers when Chrome sync is turned on. BUILT FOR LONG ARTICLES A progress bar tracks how far into the piece you are, and the header shows the author, the publication date and an estimated reading time based on the word count. LISTEN INSTEAD OF READING The read-aloud button prefers a speech voice installed on your own computer, so the text of the article stays on the device. If no local voice is available, the browser falls back to its own speech engine. PRINT AND SAVE AS PDF The print button applies a dedicated print stylesheet: article only, no toolbar, no progress bar, black text on white. What you get is the piece, not the page furniture. CODE, TABLES AND QUOTES SURVIVE Code blocks, tables, figures, captions, blockquotes and embedded video keep their structure and formatting. Technical documentation and reference pages stay readable, not flattened into plain paragraphs. HOW IT DECIDES WHAT THE ARTICLE IS The extension scores every block of the page by text length, punctuation, tag type and link density, then keeps the highest scoring section and cleans it. If the first, stricter pass removes too much, a second, more permissive pass runs automatically. When no article can be found, the page is left untouched and a short notice appears. PRIVACY No accounts, no analytics, no tracking. The extension makes no network requests of its own and has no server to talk to. Your reading preferences are the only thing stored, and they live in your own Chrome profile. All code ships inside the extension package; nothing is downloaded at runtime. WHAT IT CANNOT DO Chrome blocks every extension from running on chrome:// pages, on the Chrome Web Store and on some PDF viewers. Section fronts and feed pages may produce a list of article teasers rather than a single piece.