Here’s Why Safari 5 Reader is Cool

New Apple’s Safari 5 released with great new features. One of the coolest feature, beside 3rd party Extensions, is Safari Reader.

What is Safari Reader? If you find a page with lots of texts, by means a web page with relatively long article, a small gray “Reader” button now appears in the URL bar. If you click it, Safari strips out all of the clutter on the page (ads, widgets, sidebars, headers and footers), and presents just the text in a large typeface, cleanly formatted in a white window that floats, lightbox-style, over a darkened page.

What also cool is, Safari Reader strings multipage articles together in the same window automatically. For example, head to this well written Apple article from Fast Company using Safari 5. The article spreads into 7 pages. If you turn on Safari Reader, it will look like this:

Although it is controversial among web publishers (what Apple do that are not getting controversy anyway?), this feature is highly useful for users, who are into web reading. If you’ve connected with me at Twitter, you know that i’m a big fan of reading. And since 4 years ago, i switched to web reading. The most helpful technology in web reading to me is still Instapaper, as i find it is more comfortable to read on the iPhone than desktop with their iPhone app. But now, Safari Reader definitely comes in second.

Update: MacOSHints posted a useful tutorial on how to modify the look of Safari Reader.

Author: Robin

Jack of all trades living in SF Bay Area, California. Asian. View all posts by Robin