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.