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The CEO of Acer sounds like he's trying to make noise because Acer isn't in the competitive tablet business.

Actually, Acer has sold tablets than any other Android tablet maker, and they had features that Xoom STILL can't get working (MicroSD card writing). Everything on the acer worked out of the box, and they had sold a million of them before the other Android Tablet guys got to market.

Sure, the year's head start that Apple had means they are still at the top of the total sales chart.

Acer also sells ChromeBooks and regular laptops, and I suggest the CEO is probably in a pretty good position to measure sales trends.

The trend isn't surprising. Every new device a huge run-up in sales when first released, and then people find out the limitations, the warts, and the unmet needs, and decide they really do need a laptop after all. Everyone who wanted one badly already has one. It was iPad users that first discovered that tablets ultimately proved to hold way less appeal than they originally believed, and they were using them less than they thought.

There will be a lot of tablets of all flavors under the Christmas tree this year.

Personally, I think it looks fine.

But you can either bitch and moan about formatting, or you can get Readability and view it the way you like. Personally, I'm pro-non-bitching.

You guys need "Readability"... clears away all the clutter from web pages

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

For Readability, the readability widget is great. For sensibility, sorry mate. They don't make journalists like that any more.

Allow me

Readablity helps with that site a lot.

Is that font illegible to anyone else? I had to turn Readability on, it was so bad. Who the heck thought it was a good idea?

I recommend giving http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ a go. It can turn some of the most eye-burning of pages into a simple block of readable content.

There's probably an excellent Firefox plugin to render this page's color scheme more bearable.

I like using a Readability bookmarklet in my bookmarks bar: Readability - An Arc90 Lab Experiment

Readability often works well for condensing slide shows like this to a single page: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Mod parent up Informative.

http://www.justice.gov/criminal/cybercrime/18usc2511.htm

By the way, that page benefits *enormously* from Readability.

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Funny, the cordless telephone provisions are... uhmm... interesting. Does that mean that cordless phones enjoy the same protections as cellphones? What?

--
BMO

Here you go then: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/ - works through a bookmarklet and its the code that the Safari Reader was itself based on (Apache license, credit given by Apple in their notes).

I've been using Readability for over a year in Firefox to do the same thing. Any long reading that I have to do online gets the Readability treatment. This project has been around for a long time, and no one complained about it "trying to force an e-book style interface on the web." They just said it made things easier to read.

I don't see how this is an "arms race." Most web pages are unreadable. That is the fault of the designers. The text is too small for a high-resolution display, and it is too cluttered. There are sites out there that have ads and remain readable, but they are a tiny minority.

Bravo to Apple for making the web something you can read!

Yes, there's a reason that it does nearly the same thing. Apple's Reader uses code from Readability. Apple credits them in their license agreement and the developers over at Arc90 are happy that Apple is using their code:

Why We Built Readability
By Rich Ziade

As we've already mentioned, we couldn't be happier that Apple has chosen to leverage our own Readability as a native feature in the Safari browser. As the debate around Safari Reader heats up, we thought we'd chime in and share some of our thoughts, motivations and aspirations for what reading can become on the Web.

You mean sort of how I use Readability to clean things up before clipping to Evernote?

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Besides, as others have pointed out, if people want to use Reader on your site's content, then there is something wrong with your design.

Exactly. I've been using Readability (upon which Reader seems to be based) for a while now and found that I never bother using it on, for instance, Ars Technica. Their site is clean enough that Readability doesn't really offer much benefit.

I've been using this site for much longer than Safari has had this feature:

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Does the same thing with no browser extension. You just drop it into your shortcuts on the title bar and it cleans up many webpages. Not perfect, but so much easier than blinking flash crap.

If people want you to not block their ads, make the site readable with the ads on it.

Actually it's Readability.

Source http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/08/safari_reader_based_on_open_source_project/

TFA is a good example of why everyone should have the Readability bookmarklet handy.

You need the Readability bookmarklet.

Here you go my friend... Relief is at hand

Readability bookmarklet is your friend: http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

I call bullshit.

*I*, as the user of a computer and/or browser, decide what gets displayed (in whole or in part) on my screen in my browser. If *I* as a user, decide that I do not want ads displayed, and install an extension in my browser to accomplish that, then some other script, that has nothing itself to do with ad blocking, has *NO* business altering the ad blocking script.

As it happens, I have an entirely different solution (which is not vulnerable to these sort of hijinks) to prevent advertisers from using my display space and processor time (eg flash ads) to hawk their junk which I do not wish to buy, so this doesn't directly affect me, but the point remains the same - there is *NO* obligation on my part to display a website/page in any particular manner, or to not display only a portion of it, if I so choose, *regardless* of the site/page author/owners desires (unless said author/owner has some sort of signed contract from me that effects otherwise).

Do you consider a lynx user that visits a page and sees only the text of the page, and none of the banner ads, to be 'illegally manipulating' the authors 'content' too?

Or how about someone using Readability?

For the most part, it's the problem with the way specific sites are designed, not with browsers themselves.

Given that close to all non-trivial pages break, I doubt it. I think there are two core problems, one is that image size continue to be given in pixel instead of 'em', as most browsers are pretty bad at scaling images, thus the page layout stays rather inflexible. The other problem is that CSS doesn't have a proper way to know the size of the content its formating, so every specification of size in the CSS makes assumption about the content that no longer hold true when the font size changes, leading to overflowing boxes and all kinds of misery. Which of course relates to the problem of CSS based layout being extremely hacky compared to past table based layouts. With table based layouts its completly trivial to place to boxes horizontally next to each other with zero risk of accidental overlap, with CSS based layouts on the other side its a complete crazy hack-fest of overlapping boxes, hard coded margins and a whole bunch of other illogical crap and that is even considered "good practice", *yuck*. I would wish that CSS would allow to define layout tablets in the CSS files, thus getting rid of all the crazy hackery and still having that semantic/layout separation.

I don't see how they could possibly do that while remaining conformant with HTML and CSS. If the latter requires text layout to produce overlapped text, then that's pretty much it.

Well, the whole point is that it shouldn't be conformant, as neither of those standards guarantees good readability. I want a button that toggles between standard conform layout and readable layout. Look at the Readability script, its truly awesome, it strips out all the navigation bars, advertisements and all other distracting crap, leaving only the raw article content of a webpage, well formated with proper margins, font size and all. Its not perfect, as it doesn't work with all webpages, but when it works it improves the readability of a webpage a hell of a lot. The whole crux with browsers is that they are only good for viewing webpages, not reading them.

Instead, how about educating the web designers to use proper reflowing layouts?

The only "proper" layout is that decided by the user.

I really couldn't care less. Webbrowser these days seem to try everything to get pixel perfect rendering done, yet utterly fail at producing good looking readable webpages when there is even the tiniest deviation from the default. Try browsing with a larger default font for example, 99% webpages break, some worse then other, but pretty much all of them break. On Slashdot for example the "Reply to This" button falls apart on other webpages you are confronted with overlapping text and other unusable crap. And before somebody mentions the zoom feature, Firefox under Linux doesn't doesn't do any filtering when scaling, so all graphics look complete shit when zoom is used, making zoom unusable. There is other stuff that is annoying, for example the lack of build in support for link tags introduces in HTML2, you can get support via a plugin, but it would be nice to have solid support for that feature out of the box, maybe webpages would then finally start using it. But the most annoying thing is probably the lack of alternative view modes, I would like to have a modes that do not conform to pixel perfect rendering, but instead focus on producing readable results, i.e. avoiding overlapping text, making sure that line-width isn't to large, hide the navigation bars and all that other stuff, yet all the browser offers is pixel perfect rendering and rendering with no style sheets at all, neither of which is very readable. Luckily there is Readability which helps a good bit with that, making sure line-width is proper and navbars are gone, but again, it would be nice to have such basic stuff build into the browser.

The obsession with pixel perfect rendering and the complete ignorance on readable results is truly annoying and goes against anything that was considered "good practice" in the good old days.