Reader Mode That Just Works

If you’ve never tried reader mode, you’re missing out

Reader mode is the single most useful feature most people have never tried. Browsers have hidden it in a sub-menu for fifteen years; many users don’t know it’s there at all. The ones who do know often only remember after they’ve struggled through a paywall popover, two autoplay videos, and a comments section to read three paragraphs.

It’s the closest thing the web has to a print magazine: title, byline, body text, the images that belong to the article. No surrounding clutter. No interruptions. The reading experience your phone’s OLED screen is actually built to render well.

Try it once on a long article and you’ll wonder why every browser doesn’t make it the default. Hedgehog very nearly does — one tap on the toolbar.

Reading an article online is now hostile

Modern news sites bury the article you came for under newsletter pop-overs, sticky video players, cookie banners, "related stories" carousels, share toolbars that follow you down the page, autoplay ads in the middle of the text, comments sections longer than the piece itself, and a sidebar of recommendations chosen by an algorithm trying to keep you on site.

Firefox Reader View and Brave Speedreader try to fix this with renderer-side DOM extraction. They work on simple sites and break on complex ones — sites that load their content via JavaScript after the page renders, sites with non-standard markup, sites whose engineers specifically designed to defeat extraction. The little reader-mode icon greys out and you’re back to the cluttered version.

Strip at the network, not in the renderer

Hedgehog’s reader mode runs in our MITM proxy, not in the browser’s renderer. When you enable reader mode, our proxy intercepts the page on the way to your browser. The HTML passes through a content-extraction pipeline that identifies the article body and discards everything else — ads, navigation, sidebars, related-articles widgets, comment trees, autoplay video embeds, tracker scripts, share-toolbar overlays, sticky-newsletter pop-ups.

By the time the page reaches your browser’s renderer, it’s already a clean article: title, byline, body text, embedded images that belong to the piece. No JavaScript needed to extract the content because the extraction already happened upstream.

This is why Hedgehog’s reader mode works on sites where Firefox Reader View gives up: we don’t need to fight the page’s own JavaScript — we operate one layer below it, before the JS has a chance to run.

An article is just an article

• No newsletter pop-overs interrupting the second paragraph
• No autoplay video ad halfway down the text
• No sticky share-toolbar following you down the page
• No "Related Stories" sidebar competing for your attention
• No comments section that’s 90 % thread-derailing arguments
• Page loads in a fraction of the bytes — one extra reason mobile data lasts longer
• Battery lasts longer — no autoplay video means the radio + CPU stay quiet
• Works on sites where Firefox Reader View greys out — we don’t depend on the page’s own DOM cooperating

One proxy, multiple jobs

Hedgehog’s reader mode lives in the same MITM proxy that does ad blocking, data saving, and tracker stripping. Turn reader mode on and the article you read is ad-free, tracker-free, sidebar-free, and pre-cached at the edge. The combined effect is a reading experience that’s closer to print than to modern web.

Toggle it per-page from the toolbar; the rest of the browser carries on as normal for shopping, videos, and forms.