Google Chrome Will Be Getting A 'Reader Mode' Feature

Modern websites are more cluttered than they've ever been. Comment sections, banner ads, newsletter sign-up prompts, and more fill most sites on the internet. We try to keep things reasonable here at TechSpot, but even relatively reader-friendly websites can begin to feel a bit claustrophobic at times.

Many mobile browsers (and a couple of desktop alternatives) have tackled this problem by offering users a "Reader Mode." These modes typically eliminate all distractions, only including the content you care about: a given article's title, body text, and embedded images. This is a handy feature to have for those who prefer to read without any distractions, and Google is hoping to cater to those individuals with the latest version of Chrome Canary, its experimental browser.

In Google's own words, the tool allows you to view "simplified" versions of web pages. You access this feature by visiting an article (such as this one), clicking Chrome's three-dot menu at the top right corner, and selecting "Distill page."

If you have Canary, you can enter "chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode" into the browser's address bar to test out Chrome's experimental Reader Mode feature. It will need to be manually enabled, and a browser reboot is required before you can actually use it.

Once you've done so, the article should look something like the image shown above. Naturally, due to the feature's experimental nature, it's bound to be a bit buggy, and some websites may "Distill" differently than others. For the most part, though, it seems to work well - we've tried it across a fairly wide variety of news sites and blogs with great success.

It's not clear when (or indeed if) Chrome Canary's Reader Mode will roll out to ordinary versions of Chrome, but if you don't want to wait for that day to come, you can snag the experimental browser right here.