What is the main task I have to accomplish while reading an article on the web? The answer is obvious: the task is to read the article.
Yet looking at most websites, only a small part of the webpage actually supports this task. Safari Reader is the latest attempt to help users take matters into their hands.

A typical newspaper article View large, or large without the overlays

When we look at a typical webpage, the amount of space supporting the reading task is incredibly small.

What is all the rest of the space used for then? Navigation (in yellow), promotion for other sections of the website (in orange), and ads (often animated) for things that have nothing to do with the article (in red).

They each have very different purposes. Ads are here for the understandable reason that they bring in money and often represent the main source of income for online publications. Promotions for other sections of the website try to get me to read more content on the site, which would make me load another page containing ads, earning the site even more money. Some sites take it to the extreme and split even short articles into multiple pages.

Next is the navigation, which is here to help me move to other articles or sections of the site. However, at this point, thank you very much, I am still trying to read my article, and I haven’t finished yet.

Navigation, internal promotion, and external ads. None of these help me read my article. Which, as you remember, is what I am actually trying to do.

Readability

Several months ago, I was shown Readability , an “experiment” from some folks called Arc90. Once set up, a single click could reformat almost any article on the web into an easy-to-read and clutter-free page, only showing content. Even better, I could once again assess how long the article was, and how much I had already read, by looking at the relative size and position of my scrollbar. This was a breath of fresh air, and I have been using it continuously ever since (together with Instapaper for reading later on the go).

Safari Reader

The same page in Safari Reader See large

Recently, Apple released the 5th version of their Safari browser. It includes a feature they call Reader, which:

“removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles. So you get the whole story and nothing but the story” (from Apple’s Safari page)

Apple has used Readability’s (open source) code to build this feature and, on top of what Readability does, Safari Reader adds some nice touches: a smoother look, automatically loading multipage content at once, nice animated transitions and overlaid buttons that help the reading user (to print, change the font size, or send by email).

What Safari Reader has introduced is simply a reading mode for the web: when you enter it you get the best experience for reading, but to do anything else, you need to exit that mode.

By using a mode, Safari can focus on supporting a single task at a time, which enables it to improve the quality of the experience.

Reception

While Arc90’s little experiment did not create many waves, Apple promoting the same idea was bound to be noticed and reactions were sometimes slightly hyperbolic:

“Apple has essentially destroyed the web publishing model completely with the release of Safari 5. This is the equivalent of dropping a nuclear bomb on the entire web economy” Jim Lynch

The reasoning being that the Reader feature would block ads. This is quite exaggerated since this feature requires the page to be loaded and the ads to be displayed before I can activate it, but there is some truth to it. It probably doesn’t bother Apple that this might slightly reduce Google’s income from online advertisement, given their competition in the mobile space.

However, Safari’s Reader mode needs to be manually activated every single time, requiring me to make extra effort, which I probably  won’t, unless I am forced to by poor page design or an unreasonable number of ads.

Conclusion

The mere existence of this feature is a sign that the reading experience on the web is often not satisfactory. By failing to recognise the main need of the reading user or by letting other considerations trample this need, publishers shoot themselves in the foot and are driving their users to bypass their primary income source.

As Lukas Mathis puts it:

“If your users are using a third-party product to make your product usable, you are doing something wrong”

I look forward to the day where websites are better designed and I won’t have to use any of these band-aids to enjoy reading long online articles. Until then, I’ll happily continue to use Safari Reader, Readability and Instapaper.

For more on the subject:

Arc 90's Readability (bookmarklet that works in every browser)

Apple: What’s new in Safari 5

Nik Fletcher: On this Safari 5 Reader Hysteria

Lukas Mathis: Safari Reader

Jim Lynch: Safari Reader: Apple’s Weapon of Mass Destruction

Daring Fireball: No, Safari Reader Is Not the Beginning of an ‘Arms Race’

The Guardian: How Apple's new ad-blocker could save the media (maybe)

Ars Technica: Apple's "evil/genius" plan to punk the Web and gild the iPad