In Brave Browser Desktop 1.28.105, we are rolling out our latest updates to our Speedreader feature. Brave Beta and Nightly users may have already seen the Reader mode and Speedreader prompts in the address bar. A description of the feature can be found in Help Center → https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045031392
We’re looking for additional feedback to see if websites you are viewing are being speed read properly – whether the pages are speed read correctly, not at all, or if the speed read page appears broken.
We’d also love to hear your feature requests. We’ll be adding the ability to change fonts, sizing, and switch to dark mode in future updates of Speedreader.
brave://settings/appearance shows no entries whatsoever. Settings shows options for “Get Started”, skips “Appearance”, and next displays options for “New Tab Page”…
I remember — in an earlier version of Brave — toggling “reader” mode to “on” and trying it on a few https://www.bbc.com/news pages for which the reader mode “worked”. In quotes because IMHO — Brave doing its thing — the native page displayed just fine. IMHO with Brave’s generic intervention, the “reader”-modified page was less-readible than unmodified. Currently (with v1.28.105) I see no option — either in “Settings” or in the omnibox — to toggle the reader mode.
Updating this / echoing a comment I posted in another thread: Going to brave://flags/ I’ve had varied experience editing the options. Relevant to my earlier comment about Appearance not … appearing in my settings, checking brave://flags/ I saw I’d disabled New Tab Page Branded Wallpapers and New Tab Page Demo Branded Wallpapers. It seems this is why the entire Appearance section of Settings disappeared on my installations. Restoring these two flags to default, Settings | Appearance reappeared. Toward the bottom of Settings | Appearance, there’s a switch for Speedreader. Default is off. If you switch this to on, Speedreader will automatically distill pages it can process. That’s not what I want, but the option is available.
Feedback. I thought I was a prisoner of some deep state format because articles were popping without access to commenting. I just figured out that speed reader was on the whole system. I may have activated it without noticing.
Remarks, I live the idea of a clutter-less page, I appreciate the format but:
Authors name should be available plus the web-page’s name even in this mod. This could be dependent of participants choices of formatting I don’t know, but something to be considered.
i had problem adjusting the size of the page, smaller or larger, it appeared to be jammed at a certain gigantic font.
Formatting, for some reason, could have been associated with size of font, often the text is squeezed to the left, with some letters hidden beyond the screen border, and the same problem with the title with the first line half disappearing at the top
I did notice the button appearing on the URL when disengaging the automatic feature. Good. On the other hand t would be appreciate that somewhere on top of the page something says like: You are in Speedreader Mode, or your are using Speedreader…
Thank you.
I was confused by SpeedReader. I clicked on the Reader icon, there was a toggle so I clicked it without reading (I know, bad, but most users are like me anyway), and was in SpeedReader mode; every article was bare, and I thought there were rendering issues with Brave or my extensions (not realizing I was in reader mode, which works just fine). When I clicked the Reader Mode icon, it didn’t switch the article back to normal mode.
Honestly I think you’ll end up with a lot of confused average users over this. How I’d implement:
The first time a user visits an article with Brave, flash have a little blue highlight around the reader icon that attracts your attention, a little like how Chrome presents the tab group feature to users (don’t just make the reader icon blue, people won’t notice especially in dark mode)
Make sure it’s clear in the reader mode popup that speedreader and reader mode are different things; ideally have the toggle for speedreader in a different place, add a gears/settings icon in the upper left or upper right when viewing an article in Reader Mode for example, where you can toggle speedreader, have a print button, change font options button, etc in a column on the side. But putting both features in the same menu is confusing, especially when you’re asking me to turn on perma-Reader mode the very first time I ever use reader mode (and therefore don’t even know what I’m turning on)
Make sure if I’m in reader mode, and click on the reader mode icon, it toggles me back to the real webpage, regardless of whether speedreader is on. Right now clicking on the reader mode icon when already in reader mode does nothing.
Make sure if I can toggle something on from a menu, I can toggle it off from that menu; if you put the toggle in the reader mode icon, keep it there to turn it off.
Make it clear when the webpage is in reader mode, so users don’t get confused by where the comments went, in case they don’t know they turned on speedreader, or don’t know comments go away with reader mode.
edit: apparently (https://support.brave.com/hc/en-us/articles/360045031392), clicking on reader mode again should allow me to switch back, so that was probably a bug (I’m on the latest Brave [1.31.88 Chromium: 95.0.4638.69 (Official Build) (arm64)]). The rest of my feedback still stands.
I enjoy the speedreader feature so far, however I read a lot of mathematics heavy content and it doesn’t seem to translate LaTeX equations. Adding equation viewing support would really enhance my experience. I appreciate that this may go against the purpose of the feature, but for my my reading would be speedier if I saw the equations instead of having to interpret the TeX.
Or use something like midnightlizard but this still breaks basic UI consistency when the browser is set to dark. Years ago I reported the same with the options and various menu items that would just randomly blind you. It’s all fun and games until you have 12 monitors blasting white in your face trying to light you on fire.
It’s rather boggling how this seems to be a reoccurring issue where the UI doesn’t adhere to itself much less the OS/users choice. Though I suppose you could go farther by saying it’s sad we need a feature because the web has become a such a dumpster fire. “Features” are focused on undoing the idiotic design choices and evil lurking in the vast majority of the web.
Hello, there. Thanks for this amazing speedreader (SR) feature! Here is a website indianexpress.com. In SR mode, the first paragraph of any article in the website is not shown or removed.
Another thing, on google custom search, when we open a result, SR does not automatically changes the website to SR mode. We have to refresh the open page to make that happen. Take for example this (custom search), if you open the first article, which is of the Guardian, the page which is compatible with SR does not open in SR mode. However, SR mode it activated if we just refresh the opened page. So, this is kinda annoying to refresh page again and again everytime you open a page from custom search.
I opened the webpage that is shown in the video, but that problem does not seems to be with my version of Brave. It simply does not tries to turn the page into readermode. But it is still turned on, on the site. My brave (Beta) version → Version 1.43.67 Chromium: 104.0.5112.81.
I’m trying to get a way to read an unstyed website in a comfortable way without relying on any extension so I looked and found the speed reader feature. Also, what is reader mode? (so confusing…).
I’m going crazy around settings and flags to find a way to toggle it but it turns out that this is only available for specific domains?
I went through and search the web for a way to toggle it and I can’t seem to find it. Am I missing something or this feature needs some improvement?
Please, add a way to toggle reader mode, or speed reader or whatever you call it in an easy way.
Also, it would be nice to have something like a fuzzy finder to go though all the insane amount of feature this browser has en an easy to discover way. I would love to just hit Ctrl+Shift+B and toggle any setting.
It was fine how it was, now it’s just irritating, why do you guys have to change things that people are used to using, do you do it on purpose to just confuse people?
Now there is a daft header at the top and if you want to close the reader you have to go all the way up to that little X at the top.
It was 1 million times better before you ruined it as you could simply and without traveling your mouse all the way to the stop continue to the actual article if you wanted to. Now you have to actually do more work to use this.
it was good till you broke it.
Just bring back the old one which looked and felt better rather than sticking in bars and objects further away, you are trying to be too clever or keep you self busy.
Why do companies always like to do this no matter what their product they want to update something, move it, change it for the sake of production and really they just make it worse
