Extension Watch: Easy Reading with iReader

Productivity Sauce

As the layouts of many websites become more and more complex and overloaded with distracting elements, focusing on reading the actual contents becomes increasingly difficult. The iReader extension for Google Chrome (it works with Chromium, too) and Mozilla Firefox solves this problem by extracting the relevant content like the main text of an article from the current page and presenting the content in a nicely formatted and easy to read form.

Whenever the extension detects "extractable" content in the currently viewed page, the iReader icon is displayed in the address bar. Click on the icon to open the body text in iReader. Hover the mouse at the bottom of the iReader interface to evoke a floating palette containing a few handy buttons. Using them, you can share the page via Twitter and Facebook, as well as email and print it. The zoom buttons let you adjust the font size, and you can switch to the text-only mode by clicking on the Disable images button. The extension's options section allows you to tweak several iReader settings, such as font, article width and margin, specify a keyboard shortcut, and adjust opacity.