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The Safari Reader Arms Race
JimLynch writes "Apple, by adding Reader to Safari 5, is essentially trying to force an e-book style interface onto the web reading experience. It will never work out over the long haul because web publishers will resist and the end result will be an arms race, with publishers on one side and Apple on the other." Another unmentioned issue is that sometimes it doesn't work. I've found pages where content is omitted from the reader UI.
I've found pages where content is omitted from the reader UI.
Yeah, that's how it's supposed to work. You see, we did some lengthy behavioral studies and it turns out that t
hich proves and brings me to the scientifically irrefutable conclusion that the average user actually doesn't use up to 90% of the content they view. After learning our lesson with AT&T, we're all about efficiently utilizing networks and battery power on mobile devices here at Apple. Actually it has saved so much time and resources, we're even eating our own dog food and Apple's networks have been optim
My work here is dung.
I wasn't aware someone was forcing me to move the cursor up to the address bar and deliberately click the 'READER' button. I rather thought it was me choosing to do that, mostly to get rid of the junk that appears on these multipage articles.
I'm using the feature heavily. Totally by choice, not by force.
Cheers,
Ian
"Safari 5, is essentially trying to force an ebook style interface onto the web reading experience"
Uhhhhh - you know it's not the default viewing format, right? So "forcing" is a bit leading.
Come on, you're making a mountain out of a molehill here.
80% of Mac users won't use the Reader function, because they either don't know what it does or can't be bothered to click it. The other 20% probably use AdBlock or some other ad-blocking solution anyway.
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. Either clean it up, or decide you don't care. There is no "arms race" that you can possibly have. What, you're going to stop serving content to Safari? Good luck with that.
How is this an "arms race"? Analogy doesn't seem appropriate here. **Hype**
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
... says the guy that can't get his PHP page to function without error.
Haha, the example they give for the 'glorious chaos of an article on the web' is an article spread over 8 pages! How glorious.
On every page I have looked at, the reader has worked wonderfully. It may be the feature, along with clicktoflash, that moves me to safari.
Saying this will never work over the long haul is like saying the Camino will never work because it includes a default flash blocker or Firefox will never work because there are too many easily installed plugin to block ads. It is a web feature, apparently an open source web feature, and browsers that want to focus on user experiences will implement it as a default feature, just like pop up blocking. Browsers that do not implement will show themselves as front ends for advertisers, not browsers for users.
There are issues. The readers removes the branding from the site. This could be considered bad. But people will use for the same reason that some choose to use ad blocking. The articles spread out over 10 pages, with long waits for ads to load between pages, and infected ads, will give some cause to bypass the predefined interface. Like other tech, websites will adjust. After all, websites serve the customers, not the other way around.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
So they integrated a "Readability" feature into the browser.. So what.. I've been using this for quite a while as a bookmarklet in Firefox..
http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/
Works great and does (nearly) the same thing.. (It doesn't pull in multiple page articles.)
I'm always amused by stuff like this.
Apple does it: Apple is trying to force an ebook readeresque format.
Firefox does it in an extension: Firefox is allowing users a cleaner, less intrusive reading environment.
Who is this safari reader? What does he read? With race do he arm and with what?
Embrace, extend, extingu... oops, wrong evil empire
Call me a conspiration theorist but Apple displaying news content without the embedded ads on the web while at the same time trying to establish their own ad-platform and taking 30% of all ads served on the iPhone is a convenient coincidence, don't you think? Cutting off the publishers' revenue streams while at the same time pushing for a new revenue model on mobile phones and tablets sounds like a plan.
My point is that the web was *exactly* designed for a quiet reading experience, because it was originally supposed to be for easy dissemination of scientific research. That may not be what it is today (and it's perhaps lesser because of it), but "was never meant to" is precisely wrong.
In my not-so-humble opinion, the former of those two reasons is dramatically more important to the website author than the latter. I'd go so far as to say the latter was a desperate justification for the former. The author apparently thinks so too, because when challenged to reverse his policy (put everything on one page and have a button to split the article into multiple ones), he demurs.
Now, I'm not against websites making money from advertisers. If that's your business model, all the more power to your elbow, but there are sites out there that extract the proverbial urine, and I'm equally supportive of methods to defeat that. The website absolutely has the right to serve adverts. Equally, the user has the right to work around that if (s)he is sufficiently motivated to. Advertisers seem to want to motivate users to do that, these days, is all I'm saying.
I'm far more likely to read an article on arstechnica that's spread out over multiple pages specifically because each page has a lot of relevant content and it hangs together well. I'm far less likely to want to read a multi-page article where each "page" is a 40-word paragraph - *those* are the sites that Safari Reader will be a blessing for.
It's also not clear to me that this is a doomed battle for Reader. HTTP is a simple protocol, and it's relatively easy to forge a user's browsing habits programmatically
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
for Ubuntu?
I do not think they try to force anything.
Just like Greasemonkey modifies web content, Safari offers and alternate view you can use when navigating to a page.
I, for one welcome innovation such as this one.
Arms race? You still go to the page, you still see the banners and the page structure (not missing an ad), THEN you can click on the "READER" in the address bar and bring up the reader interface.
I welcome the idea of reading an actual article without blinking SHIT all over the place, but then again, the blinking SHIT is there, so if you are interested in it, you can click on an ad.
And yes, I click on ads when they are worth clicking on, but I am completely sick of people masking google and other ads as contextual links. They barely take you to a page related to most documents.
. . . because many web developers are complete idiots and don't develop their sites with their heads. Instead they use arcane means of development - like tables - as a quick fix for their design. Don't blame Apple if your brain-dead site doesn't work with Reader. Blame the lazy developer that couldn't be bothered to learn web standards.
Jobs said he wanted the web to be open.
The number of times Apple has made itself into a joke since that letter is staggering.
You don't know what will work out, Steve will tell you what will work out.
What Steve tells you will workout, you will like.
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.
I don't see a huge problem with this. Anybody who publishes on the web knows that a client may choose to render the content in arbitrary ways. My browser doesn't have to pull all the images and frames.
I can see this being a big deal for people using screen readers. Apple should market the reader function as an accessibility feature. Why would you block a technology developed for your blind readers?
Cory
"There is a reader option on Safari 5." Would be a much better article than the one posted, while sharing the same information and NOT sharing false info. It doesn't always work 100% is truth, but at the same time I'm not being forced to use it, and it's not by default (the most important). This is a poorly written and misleading article unfortunately.
If web pages actually gave readers what they wanted, they wouldn't need to be afraid. Multi-page articles are a complete annoyance and have now become much more bearable thanks to this feature.
Just to give an idea of how much the author of the article respects the reader, here is an extract from another article that Jim Lynch wrote about the evil threat that is Safari Reader and what it provides:
I highlighted the two worst parts of the description:
1. No ads.
2. Multi-page articles are now essentially one page.
Clearly he is thinking about the consumer when creating content if that statement is anything to go by
On other topic.... his website uses the annoying tynt copy/paste functionality. Argh!
Whilst I accept that a lot of people presume that the HTML served from their web server is going to be rendered as they intended in the client browser, that is not, and should not be a foregone conclusion. HTML describes content - it is then for the client browser to render that content. Extracting just the content I am interested in is surely a valid use of that content, and unless web sites start to use a different model for their content (i.e. restrictive) then this should not really be a surprise.
I have used Reader, and I personally like it, but I have only used in on a handful of websites that are chock-full of spurious crap other than the content I am interested in.
Any fool can talk, but it takes a wise man to listen.
At some point, and it looks like soon, the Internet will hit a "Tower of Babel Moment" where the so-far successful universal interconnectivity of all systems will falter, fracture, and fragment into limited-interaction groups. By choice or by consequence, participants adhering to different standards will just lose the ability to communicate. Intense vertical integration on one platform will cause fundamental incompatibility with others, and "universal access" will become impractical.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
This isn't being forced. This isn't stopping ads from loading. All this does is hilight the article content in an easy to read way, through the user's own actions.
What we might see as a result is that the content providers might not use the <article> tags (bad), or simply insert a premium-price ad image within the article text on each page, so the article is divided into sections by advertisements when Reader is used (better, still not technically standards-compliant). Initial page loads still view the ads, and reader will still load images IIRC, so AdBlock/NoScript is still a bigger problem. Nothing to see here.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
... I now tracked down what this reader thing is. It's awesome. Great feature THAT I CHOOSE TO CLICK ON TO USE.
Honestly, how is this a major complaint by people? Am I a fan-boy for liking this?
Gads, Slashdot used to be interesting and informative. The editors need a vacation to relax. In fact, take an iPad and read a good book!
These are the same feeble arguments used by TV advertisers when the old ReplayTV boxes would automatically skip ads for you. Instead of figuring out a way to make ads less obtrusive so people wouldn't skip them, they sued ReplayTV out of existence, and everyone has been too afraid or bought off to institute that feature since.
So, we're forced to do without a more than 10 year old feature that most people would desire, because advertisers think they have a constitutional right to make their money in exactly the same way forever.
Sounds fair, ya?
Go Reader. Yay team.
Am I the only person who saw the headline and thought it was about an arms race by e-reader manufacturers to be the first to support safari books online?
I have no idea how this plays into the corporate strategic chess game.
For me, it's very simple. I am Apple's customer, and Apple has put a darned nice feature into the web browser that makes the web work more nicely for me. I'm surprised nobody's done it before. I'm glad they've done it now. I'll enjoy it for as long as it works.
One of the things I dislike about Microsoft is that they never act as if I were their customer. I always feel that everything they do has a string attached, a hidden agenda, and they always serve Microsoft's needs first, then those of Dell and HP. I'm not even sure Microsoft regards me as their customer.
Oddly enough, the thing I like best about the "reader" is not that it removes ads, but that it allows me to read something in one window while it flips the pages of some interminably slow multipage article, and then lets me look at the completed article without waiting for new pages to load. I'd like it even if it preserved all the ads.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Strange I don't remember this many complaints when browsers started including pop up blockers.
It's not an arms race, because once the ad-crap becomes too annoying the user will conclude that the only winning move is not to play and just leave the site for less ad-infested waters.
For persons using screen readers to read web content (Apple VoiceOver, for example) the option to simplify the content of an article and automatically pull it together as a single page is wonderful.
Try closing your eyes and reading, via a text to speech system, a typical Forbes article broken across five pages packed with links, for example. This option or the Firefox Readability extension speeds things up something wonderful.
By far, my favorite feature is the dramatically improved readability. Because I am 50 years old, I find it difficult to read small fonts - and find myself zooming in web pages frequently. Safari Reader helps me overcome these following web design difficulties:
Adblock killed my mother, you insensitive clod!
The primary reason why reverse-engineering is almost never done is that you can't use the result anyway. Copyright prevents that.
Nonsense. If that were true IBM would still be the only maker of PCs. Compaq reverse engineered the BIOS and the rest is history. Just because you reverse engineer something doesn't automatically mean a copyright violation. Reverse engineering happens legally every day. Patents can provide some protection against reverse engineering but copyright provides little in most cases.
With copyright gone, reverse engineering tools would become much much better.
Even if that were true (and I'm not conceding that it is - reverse engineering is and always will be hard) with copyright and patents there is no need for them. Why create an arms race those who want to hide code and those who want to reverse engineer it when with copyright and patents there is (generally) no need to do so? Your proposal would create additional incentives for people to hide their work instead of sharing it and we have enough problems with that already.
And it's nice and all, but I don't see how it compares to Adblocking (in the sense that those that make money off of ads get upset). It's just something that's on top of your site, after it's done loading. Anyone can do that by extracting the text somehow. Safari implements a tool for it. I still see the rest of the site. There wasn't any obvious full screen option to it that would cover the stuff on the sides, but somehow Ctrl+mouse wheel makes it wider (or thinner) while Ctrl++ doesn't.
I'll be sticking with using NoScript, Adblock and blocking third party cookies in Firefox, though.
We are all God's parents.
Just because you reverse engineer something doesn't automatically mean a copyright violation.
You not only have to reverse engineer, you have to reimplement from scratch. Reverse engineering is relatively easy, the documentation + cleanroom part is hard.
Your proposal would create additional incentives for people to hide their work instead of sharing it and we have enough problems with that already.
Practically all software which isn't Free Software is already hidden. For the rest, the source is useless because you still have to do the documentation + reimplementation. It can't get worse.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
is not to "upgrade" to Safari 5.
which I am doing. not upgrading.
I "upgrade" security functions, and let others find the problems with other one-way "upgrades" first.
to this point, I have rejected Safari 5 three times.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Unfortunately, none of that's true any more. Printed material is a narrower and narrower market, and although page-display rates in The New Yorker won't be tanking any time soon, the value of a display ad in a daily newspaper is through the floor. And everyone can skip adverts on the TV by just running a PVR a few minutes in arrears. For digital media, page impressions can be measured. And it's getting easier and easier to trace click-throughs and conversions back to individual adverts. So the advertising space is worth less, in some cases worthless, and agencies can make a much better judgement on which parts of their adverts are working.
Moreover, there is less and less willingness to see advertising as an inevitable evil, or even as something there's a patriotic duty to watch. The logic of content providers appears to be that as they won't or can't paywall (for reasons that aren't entirely clear), the only thing left is adverts, and therefore it's unsporting of people to point out the flaws in the model. If people either block, ignore or go `meh', especially in the contracting economy, the value of advertising falls. There's something that can be done to fix that. Making the adverts louder and brasher doesn't work.
We know it doesn't work, because in Europe we have a legally enforceable equivalent of the US `Do Not Call' register, which does not have all the weak exemptions of the American version. Everyone with enough neurons to have an income is on it, so outbound telemarketing is effectively dead: the companies still doing it are chasing a smaller and smaller pool of people who are not opted out, and as the obnoxiousness rises, the incentive to opt out rises with it. Soon every telemarketer will be getting the engaged tone from the one person left accepting their calls. Web advertising has the same problem: as more and more people avoid it (and, to be clear, the Safari Reader mode is an absolute game changer) the median income of people still reading adverts will fall. That's a death spiral.
My contention is that Rupert Murdoch is rarely wrong (Myspace was a rare misstep). He was long-term right about the Wapping strike, although people told him to surrender. He was long-term right about satellite TV and sports rights, although people told him to stop wasting money. Betting against The DIrty DIgger is not for the faint-hearted. I think advertising as a means to fund mass-market communication will die over the next twenty years, and we will see a slimmer market for commercial content, funded by micro-payments. There's no positive argument for advertising: it only exists because the advertisers want it to, and because the content providers believe it's the only model they can use. With no consumer pull, and declining practicality, why should it survive?
Of course, it probably means The New Yorker will cost me $6 an issue. But as it's currently only $140 to have forty-six issues a year AIRMAILED to Europe, that's obviously a ludicrously subsidised price. Advertising is like the emperor's clothes: it exists because no-one dares to believe it can't. But in the end, it won't.
Call me a conspiration theorist but Apple displaying news content without the embedded ads on the web while at the same time trying to establish their own ad-platform and taking 30% of all ads served on the iPhone is a convenient coincidence, don't you think?
No, I don't think. In fact it makes no sense whatsoever.
Reader affects sites people view on the web. Furthermore, it only lets you read content ad-free AFTER ads have loaded and you have looked at them at least once (on the first page).
Now over to iAds. It's a component of the iPhone SDK that allows you to more easily embed ads in an APPLICATION. It's not targeting the web, at all. But even if it were - it would still be dropped by Reader the same way all other ads are! iAds is simply a way to drop an HTML5 container in your application which is then fed ads according to criteria you specify.
Ads on the web are mature, which is why Apple has no interest in moving into that market. Ad frameworks on mobile devices were pretty rough, and Apple saw how they could improve on them so they did.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Where in the constitution does it say:
And every man who hat a webpage shall have the advertisement pay stream protected by law.
The day that a newspaper cannot deliver adds through the web is the day that they should change their delivery method, not the day that we should change the web.
The whole idea of sending everything in open formats like HTML is to allow freedom on the part of the end users, not to lock down everything so we can protect the adddollars of publishers.
Reader affects sites people view on the web. Furthermore, it only lets you read content ad-free AFTER ads have loaded and you have looked at them at least once (on the first page).
Ads which are shown for the brief period it takes to activate Reader are less exposed than those that appear on a page while it is read, and so must eventually pay less. As well, ads that would have appeared on second and subsequent pages are never displayed.
Now over to iAds. It's a component of the iPhone SDK that allows you to more easily embed ads in an APPLICATION. It's not targeting the web, at all. But even if it were - it would still be dropped by Reader the same way all other ads are! iAds is simply a way to drop an HTML5 container in your application which is then fed ads according to criteria you specify.
Some iApps are newspapers, which compete with the websites of these papers. Reader is a Safari feature that can only tamper with websites.
Ads on the web are mature, which is why Apple has no interest in moving into that market. Ad frameworks on mobile devices were pretty rough, and Apple saw how they could improve on them so they did.
Ads on the web are vulnerable and competitive, while those on Apps give Apple a tamper-free monopoly.
I suppose iAds could be blocked using a proxy if on Wi-Fi, but how could it be done on 3G?
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!
"Your proposal would create additional incentives for people to hide their work instead of sharing it and we have enough problems with that already."
It can't get much worse than it is now. I'd say: let's get rid of copyrights and patents and take our chances.
Didn't you know that until Apple ships it, it simply doesn't exist?
It's in my head. I simply don't see most ads, unless they're for something that interests me. Most ads are irrelevant to me: I have very little disposable income, so I'm not much good as a consumer, but show me a web - or magazine - page and then ask me afterwards what ads were on it and most of the time I couldn't tell you. It's like that psychology experiment in which a guy in a gorilla suit walks across the scene and nobody sees him. Aren't we all like that? Really intrusive ads - particularly anything using sound, or covering the page, have a negative effect: I will never buy their stuff even if I want it. I like Reader. I don't like web sites where the background is hundreds of little pictures of the self-important geek who made it.
Science fiction for grown-ups...
I found that Safari Reader improves Jim Lynch's ugly-ass website at least tenfold. It doesn't seem to improve the daft content, though.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
Looking for an eBook "experience"? Hell, I just want to be able to read the damn content! Dammit, Jim, I'm getting old! My eyesight is giving out! Do web designers use small and medium tags any more? Nooooo! I got my standard font size cranked up to 16! My web browser canna take anymore! She's gonna explode!
Damn stupid twit.
Now leave me alone so I can go chase those damn kids off my lawn. Hmph.
Tell me what I'm for, damn stupid bastard. Ow! There goes my damn hip again. Damn doctors ain't worth a damn.
An' everything is an "experience" now, and everything is a "technology," a damn "innovative technology experience." I'll give you an experience all right.
HEY! YOU! GODDAMN KIDS, GET OFF MY LAWN!
Damn Slashdot "comments" ain't nothin' but noise nowadays. Damn kids. Don't know why I bother reading it anymore. Oof! Damn chair ain't good for shit.
Hey, I like that IKCD guy. Damn guy doesn't draw 'em quick enough for me. Damn comic... drawer guy.
"Where's my other sock?" - A. Einstein
Actually, the iPhone is argueably the most useable smartphones for the blind.
I paid the going retail price for a Windows screen reader and got a free Unix computer!