Get Safari’s new ‘reader’ feature in Chrome & Firefox

Apple pushed out Safari 5 earlier today. With it came a new feature called ‘Reader’ that, in the words of Apple themselves,: -

"…removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story. It works like this: As you browse the web, Safari detects if you're on a web page with an article. Click the Reader icon in the Smart Address Field, and the article appears instantly in one continuous, clutter-free view. You see every page of the article — whether two or twenty. “

Now that sounds good to me. Sadly the feature refused to work  when we tried Safari 5 out via Wine earlier today but the ‘that sounds good to me’ factor stayed with me; Just how could I get this functionality in Chrome or Firefox?

Easily it turns out. I literally spent about 3 minutes searching before I had the following extensions installed and running.

• Readability Redux for Chrome/ium
• Readability Extension for Firefox

Annoyingly the Chrome plug-in removes images too, which the Reader feature in Safari doesn’t but it remains a great way to read articles without any visual framing or distractions.

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Safari 5 works via Wine; handles basic browsing well

Apple have just launched version 5 of their flagship web browser Safari for Windows and Mac. Linux users who, for some reason or another, feel left out and want to see what the fuss is about will be pleased to learn that Safari almost works well under Wine.

Protracted emphasis on the 'almost' as whilst Safari 5 handles basic pages like Wikipedia, BBC News, Google.com & search results with relative ease caveats remain elsewhere. Calling the Safari 'top sites' speed-dial page or using more than one tab results in a swift and flawless victory for the crash gods, rendering is pretty darn slow on every page & the new 'reader' feature (which presents a page in an acely formatted overlay) doesn't work at all.

HTML5, Flash & Other bits n' bobs
Providing you have Flash installed under Wine you'll find that YouTube and flash-using sites work at varting degrees of acceptable performance. Install Quicktime via Wine and most HTML5 videos (that use the H.264 codec) work, too.

Install in Wine
Still, if you're keen to try it out you can download the Windows installer @ apple.com/safari/download and install via Wine as per any other application. Remember to mark both the launcher and resulting desktop icons are 'Trusted' (Right Click > properties > 'allow executing as programme' )


Disclaimer: Remember that not everyone's results or experiences with an application in Wine will be uniform.

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