Forum Discussion
Reading View in Insider Channels
Microsoft Edge’s reading view experience is designed to let you read web content without any extraneous information or anything jarring that strain your eyes. Reading is
one of the primary activities that people do on the web. In most cases, it is hindered by ads and other irrelevant content that can be distracting. Reading view solves this problem by transforming the page completely to offer an immersive reading experience to people while consuming content on the web.
How to enter Reading View
Reading view can be accessed for most of the websites that have a lot of content to read. Some categories of such websites are news, articles, blogs, stories etc. To enter reading view, you can go on any of the websites that fall in the above categories and check out for a book shaped icon () in the top right corner of the address bar (as seen in the screenshot below). Reading view currently works for Windows, macOS and Edge on Android.
Reading View entry point on desktop
Reading View entry point on Android
Reading View experience
Once you enter Reading view, you will see the page transformed into a cleaner layout that has been optimized for efficient reading. The background theme, the fonts, line spacing, number of words per line etc. have been adjusted for a favorable reading experience. Apart from a distraction free and clean layout, research suggests that these changes help improve comprehension, concentration, and speed. See the images below on how it transforms the page.
Reading View experience on desktop
Reading View Experience on Android
At the same time, we have changed the layout from the previous version to a vertical one on desktops since it was one of the most requested changes by the users. We are working on the reading bar that can be used for customizing the background themes and font sizes and you will be able to access those features soon.
To exit, click the same icon and seamlessly get back to the original webpage.
Grammar tools:
To assist users with reading comprehension, reading view offers Grammar tools built right into the experience.
Click on the Grammar tools option on the toolbar and turn on parts of speech. This will highlight the text in reading view with colors associated with Nouns, Verbs or Adjectives.
To get assistance in pronunciations, you can turn on the " Syl•la•bles” option to see text broken down into chunks that make correct sounds for that language.
Grammar tools may not be available in your version of Edge yet. You can either wait for the version of Edge with Grammar tools in reading view or you can enable the following flag by going to edge://flags and enabling the Grammar tools item there.
Directly opening Reading View from bookmarks
You can also easily bookmark your favorite articles and open directly in reading view. As you can see, the URLs of all pages in reading view start with “read:” and hence can be uniquely identified. So, any webpage that is saved on your device or shared to friends will be automatically navigated to reading view for an engaged reading.
What do you think?
We’d appreciate if you can give reading view a try and let us know if you run into issues or have new ideas for the reading view functionality. Also, do comment on the layout of the experience and tell us if you want to see reading view on websites where we do not support currently. We would love to hear back from you. Click on the send feedback button and drop us a note.
91 Replies
Elliot Kirk I use reading view a lot, mostly on technical/legal websites were articles are long. Your post mentions customization tools coming in future iterations.
A customization tool that I would like to see is a tool giving users the option to (1) set the background color to either beige or white, (2) set the typeface to serif or sans-serif, and (3) adjust font size. This isn't just a whim on my part. I'm in my 70's, and and for those of us with aging eyes, these customization options would increase usability.
Compare/contrast the two screens below:
aditya10Microsoft
Hi tomscharbach
Thank you for your feedback. We are glad reading view is helping you read more effectively. This has always been a motivation while designing the feature. We hear you and will definitely work on the things that you've mentioned. :)
There are a bunch of features and tools in the Edge version of RV including, ones you mention. We are all anxiously awaiting them in the Edge C version. We have been told all will be there by the time Edge C becomes our default browser.
And here is a wee tip for you. In your Win10 > Settings > Ease of access. There you find a slider which will change/ set just only the text size. Try it, you will like it 😊
Cheers,
Drew- Drew. DREW! Wow. My man. Thanks!!! 😅🤣 How did I miss that? I was able to figure out how to make my Mouse Cursor big and as Orange as the Capture One Pro UI's Orange Highlight.
Thanks also for the the extra info about Reading View coming to Edge (Chromium) (RTM?)
When will we get inking and send features in Edge chromium?Elliot Kirk
Elliot Kirk need the ability to adjust the background and fonts, losing embedded media also kills the mode at the moment
Elliot Kirk Great feature, and a very readable page layout. Could I just ask to enable keyboard shortcut (original Ctrl-Shift-R would be perfect), so that I can invoke Reading View without reaching to the mouse?
- aditya10
Hi michalsz74
Thanks for the feedback. Glad you are enjoying it. Yes, keyboard shortcut is in the pipeline and you can very shortly start using it :)
so I couldn't find the print button in reading view, but I could still do it by CTRL + P , but it couldn't print the whole pages, it only printed the current page. I wonder if there's any way to do it right.
Thanks.
I have another one, if you guys read an article in reading view mode that has links that bring to another website and after that we want back to our previous article by clicking the 'back' button it will show 'cant reach the page', well we can easily reload the page and then everything's is find but sometimes it's annoying.
And for the note it has no problem if the link just bring me to another page or articles in the same website.Thanks,
- RV is missing all its tools / features, right now. We are it will be complete by Edge release time.
For now and btw, clutter-free printing will give the same result as is expected from RV, the article sans fluff.
Cheers,
Drew
Sent from my Windows Phone
Nice work! working really good so far. I have tried it on English, Arabic and Persian and is working great!
- aditya10
Adding "read:" before the URL doesn't work. This worked in all other Edge versions (Win10, Android, iOS) to force Reading View. But here it doesn't work. Maybe you can repair this feature. It was always helpful to force pages into Reading View, even if Edge doesn't think the page is ready for Reading View.
PS: On a sidenote in classic Edge the Reading View was scrolled horizontally instead of vertically and also had a very nice column view. This was better than what the new Edge has.
MartinProhn forcing reading view would be great for me too. There are still many pages where Edge doesn't offer reading view while it would really benefit from it. And if I carefully manipulate the URL with "read://" in front and append "?url=<completurl>" it seems to work just fine.
- Seconding this. I liked being able to force some sites into reading mode for a host of reasons.
- aditya10
Hi Thomas Amos
Can you suggest some sites that you like to force-fit into reading view and we do not offer the book icon? Will be a great input for us to work on our eligibility algorithm.
- Yes, please re-implement Edge Classic Reading View in it's entirety.
Elliot Kirk Using reading mode grows on me, instead of painstakingly using extensions to de-clutter websites.. :) Really looking forward to seeing possibilities for customization.
For inspiration, I can bring up 'Wikiwand', an extension for Wikipedia, that changes the page layout, and I really like their customization options:
- Dark/night mode (following the trend in this day and age..)
- Font size and type (sans-/serif).
- Text width and justification.They even have two presets, "Rich" and "Minimal" for quickly changing the layout and look.
Thanks for listening, keep up the good work!
BestElliot Kirk An observation: since Microsoft, like Google & Farcebook, relies on advertising at us to pay the bills, isn't reading mode a kind of footshot? Don't get me wrong, I hate ads (I'm in the UK, we have the BBC😍)
Also could you provide some guidelines of what makes edge offer reading view? I've been using edge-dev for a month or so, and I've never seen the button appear.
LegacyOfherot You'll see a book-like button in the address bar. Simply click it and it will switch to Reading mode...
Elliot Kirk the features are exactly what we need.
I have two feature requests for Reading Mode:
- Option to see the definitions of words in the Reading View itself. This is one of the best features of Reading mode that Edge Classic had. It looks something like this:
This is one of very handy features and will be much appreciated by the users. - Option to Read aloud the article in Reading Mode available in the Reading Mode Toolbar, which is shown in the top option bar in Edge classic. It is also shown in the snip above.
Both of these features will make the Reading Mode complete in addition to the customization options and the Grammar Tools available...🙂
Rohit Yadav
I, for one, certainly support you. They are saying the RV Features/Tools of which, we know & speak, will be in RV by or before release of (new) Edge. 🤞
Cheers,
DrewDrew1903 thanks for your reply ☺
Another bug I'd like to mention here is that, if you open a secured site in the Reading Mode, the site info is displayed as insecure. This must be corrected to show the info of the original page for which the Reading mode has been turned on...Here is a snip showing the same:
The site's favicon on the tabs also gets lost there (shown in snip), which is not nice. Either the original site's favicon should be shown or a new Reading mode icon should be displayed over there...😄
- Option to see the definitions of words in the Reading View itself. This is one of the best features of Reading mode that Edge Classic had. It looks something like this:
