Firefox has a feature I've used more than almost any other: Reader View. It's been around since 2014, it's built into every Firefox installation, and most people either don't know about it or forget it exists.
Here's the full guide.
What Reader View Does
Reader View strips the "furniture" from a web page — navigation, ads, sidebars, related article carousels, headers, footers — and displays just the article content with clean typography, your preferred font size, and your color scheme.
The result: an article that's as readable as a well-designed book page, from any website, regardless of how cluttered the original design is.
How to Use It
When an article is readable in Reader View, a small icon appears in the address bar (looks like lines of text). Click it, or press F9.
The article immediately switches to the clean view. You can adjust:
- Font size (slider)
- Font style (three options)
- Color scheme (light, dark, sepia, high contrast)
- Width (narrow, medium, wide)
Your preferences persist across sessions.
Which Sites Support It
Reader View works on most text-heavy pages: news articles, blog posts, Wikipedia, documentation. It doesn't work well on:
- Home pages and listing pages (no primary article content)
- Interactive web apps
- Image galleries
- Pages with primarily video content
If the icon doesn't appear, the page isn't compatible with Reader View.
Reading Mode for Productivity
Beyond just aesthetics, Reader View has practical productivity uses:
Copy-pasting content: The cleaned-up text is much easier to select and copy than a cluttered article page with ads mixed into the content.
Printing: Reader View produces much cleaner print output. F9 → Ctrl+P is the best way to print any article.
Focus: Reading something important in Reader View instead of the original page means no notification boxes appearing, no popups, no related article suggestions.
Saving pages: The Reader View content is what gets saved when you use Firefox's "Send to Device" feature or the built-in Pocket integration.
Reader View + Keyboard Navigation
Once in Reader View, keyboard shortcuts work cleanly:
- Space to scroll down, Shift+Space to scroll up
-
F5orF9to toggle back to normal view -
Ctrl+Pto print the clean version
A Note on New Tab Extensions
One reason I pair Reader View with Weather & Clock Dashboard as my new tab: both tools prioritize removing friction and distraction from reading. The new tab shows me the weather and world clocks I need, without anything competing for attention. Reader View shows me the article I'm reading, without anything competing for attention.
They're different features solving the same problem: removing the noise that Firefox's powerful extension ecosystem and built-in tools let you remove, permanently.
Limitations
- Not available on mobile Firefox (though Firefox for Android has its own reading mode)
- Doesn't preserve interactive elements (forms, calculators)
- Doesn't work on paywalled content (you still need a subscription)
- Image quality can vary depending on how the site structures its markup
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