Description of the issue:
The Simplified View toast notification no longer appears on any website anywhere making it impossible to view any sites in Simplified View.
How can this issue be reproduced?
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Go to any website that a couple of months ago would have shown the “View Simplified Page?” (or whatever it said exactly) toast notification directly under or above the browser address bar depending on where the user’s address bar is located.
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The toast notification no longer appears on any webpage anywhere so you can’t view pages in Simplified View any longer.
Expected result:
The Simplified View toast notification appears on some page on some website somewhere. The toast notification appeared regularly in a recent previous version of the browser but of course I don’t remember exactly which one.
Brave Version( check About Brave):
Brave 1.63.174, Chromium 122.0.6261.128
Mobile Device details
Samsung Galaxy S9, Android 10
Additional Information:
Speedreader mode / Reader Mode which serves the same purpose as Simplified View with only a few cosmetic differences works fine on many websites including many mainstream news site articles without paywalls like CNN and foreignpolicy.com in Brave Nightly, Brave Beta, Firefox For Android, and Samsung Internet Browser.
In the mainstream version of Brave the toggle option for “simplified view for webpages” under Settings->Accessibility is still available and enabled. I also have all app-related notifications enabled except for Brave Ads and I am not viewing sites in desktop mode at the time that the toast notification should show up.
Perhaps Simplified View is being deprecated in the main branch release of Brave and will be replaced with the newer Reader Mode in the hopefully near future? I don’t see anything in the Android version changelog going back to the February 22nd, 2024 release about disabling the simplified view functionality.
Simplified View not working any longer specifically in the Android version of Brave has been brought up in multiple Google Play Store reviews and reddit threads going back approximately one month ago so it’s not just me experiencing this issue.
Update:
I tested multiple news websites on older browser version 1.60.116, Chromium 119, released in November 2023, using someone’s Samsung Galaxy A14 with auto-update disabled and multiple non-paywalled news site articles still render fine in Simplified View after clicking the “View Simplified Page?” toast notification (mediaite.com for example).
I then tested various non-paywalled news articles using the latest Android version of Chrome with the view simplified pages toggle enabled in settings and the reader mode button isn’t appearing on some various news article sites where it should be appearing so this may be an upstream Chromium update issue.