Reading View in Insider Channels

Microsoft

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 (reading_view00.png) 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_view01.png

Reading View entry point on desktop

reading_view02.png

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_view03.pngreading_view04.png

Reading View experience on desktop

reading_view05.pngreading_view06.png

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.reading_view07.png

 

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.reading_view08.png

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

Hi @Rohit Yadav 

 

Thanks for the feedback. The bugs are duly noted and we will get them fixed. 

@Elliot 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:smiling_face_with_heart_eyes:)

 

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 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!
Best

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.

@Elliot Kirk 

 

Nice work! working really good so far. I have tried it on English, Arabic and Persian and is working great!

@Elliot Kirk

 

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.

@Anoop_Gopikumar

 

but I wonder if edge wouldn't support .epub file anymore

 

Thanks,

Hi @emboel 

 

We are glad you are enjoying the feature and your feedback is duly noted. Watch out for the customisation options coming shortly :)  

Hi @ahmed_kaouri 

 

We are glad you're liking it. Keep using the feature and provide your feedback :)

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

Hi @alex_17 

That's a great catch. We have opened a bug for the same and will get it resolved soon. Thanks for reaching out. 

Hi @MartinProhn 

Thanks for reaching out. "Read:" functionality is unavailable right now but is definitely in the pipeline. As  per your comment on the horizontal layout, we have noted it and will reach out to the respective team to provide this feedback. 

 

Hi @Drew1903 

Thanks for reaching out. Watch out for the tools / features that you love in reading view. They will start coming shortly. 

Yes thanks, good to know... Especially, as that is what I have been telling Folks, too ☺

Cheers,
Drew

Sent from my Windows Phone

@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 

 

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,

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 :)

@Elliot Kirk need the ability to adjust the background and fonts, losing embedded media also kills the mode at the moment

When will we get inking and send features in Edge chromium?@Elliot Kirk