Speedreader Feedback

Browser Support
9

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.