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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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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.