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.

Comments

That Is a Feature

[eldavojohn]

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

Re:That Is a Feature

[shmlco]

"But what apple now has done is unfair..."

This from a crowd that rabidly defends its "right" to use AdBlock and FlashBlock and NoScript and Greasemonkey.

All of which are add-ons designed (in part) to strip web sites of their ad-based revenue streams.

At least with Safari's reader mode the page loads first -- with the ads. You then make a conscious choice to click the Reader button and just see main body text.

Re:That Is a Feature

[BobMcD]

The web site owners have reason to be peeved - if the user uses reader extensively, for web sites that are ad-based, they have no revenue stream.

No revenue stream? I'm sure Apple will sell them iAds, so what could possibly be the problem?

lol

Force?

[mccalli]

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

Re:Force?

[Duradin]

It's from Apple, it's an option, therefore it is mandatory.

Re:Force?

[mikael_j]

Agreed, I love the Reader feature of Safari 5 and personally I actually hope it annoys, pisses off and financially hurts those who insist on spreading one page's worth of content over ten pages cluttered with regular banner ads, those rollover video ads ("Buy our new software/hardware now, it's totally awesome and I'm totally not annoying you by being loud and covering the content you came here for!") and popover javascript/flash banners (lots of tech sites seem to use these as well).

Re:Force?

[bonch]

You'll find a lot of misinformation about the Safari Reader feature because it removes ads and combines those incredibly annoying multi-page articles into one page, so online publishers don't want anyone using it. Arstechnica staff came out against it, with one contributor saying, "Jobs can go fuck himself." Needless to say, my desire to use it when reading their site increased.

Forcing?

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Hype!

[psydeshow]

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.

Re:Hype!

[ifrag]

some other ad-blocking solution

For use on OS-X, probably using glimmerblocker. Nice for those using multiple browsers since it runs as proxy. Also never becomes incompatible between Safari versions (add-on experience in Safari has been less than ideal during transitions).

Arms Race

[religious freak]

How is this an "arms race"? Analogy doesn't seem appropriate here. **Hype**

"It'll never work"

[BlueBoxSW.com]

... says the guy that can't get his PHP page to function without error.

I love how this happens.

[magnwa]

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.

Coincidence?

[kylant]

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.

A matter of fact, A matter of opinion

[Space cowboy]

Two things:

• The author states: The web was never meant to provide a reading experience similar to an ebook or print book. That's patently not true. I set up one of the first websites in the UK (when you still had to email CERN to tell them a new website was in the world :), and I remember just how plain and boring^W"quiet" the WWW was This was before the <IMG SRC= tag came along.
  
  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.
• The author then goes on to say (in both text and comments) that there are two main reasons websites split articles over multiple pages - to monetise the site, and to help all those users who fret about scrolling the page.
  
  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

Re:A matter of fact, A matter of opinion

[Arker]

Yes, the claim as to what the web was designed and intended for could not be more bass-ackwards. HTML is a semantic markup language, not a presentation language, for a reason. I havent used this safari reader whatsit myself, but from what I have read, it sounds like it is a perfect example of what the web was designed for - it's an example of the client software making independent decisions on presentation and that is exactly what client software is supposed to do.

Re:Um, Nothing new here..

[figleaf]

There is a even a firefox addon for Readability.
Safari has apparently taken the code from Readability (it says so in the credits).

Apple should target the blind

[Eponymous Coward]

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

Isn't that the point of markup?

[AccUser]

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.