Safari 5 Reader Mode

This sounds like a strike back at overly intrusive ads. [Link]

There’s a tonne of posts today about the slick new Safari Reader feature Ilinked to yesterday. As someone who enjoys reading decent content online, I totally welcome it. I’ve used readability / Instapaper bookmarklets for some time - both on my Mac and iPhone - and, if I’m honest, I’m surprised at the reaction from outlets that call out Safari 5’s Reader feature. If you believe some quarters of the press, the Reader functionality is an affront to online advertising revenues - choking outlets of their deserved revenue and attempts at profit. There’s also clearly some folks who haven’t actually tried Reader.

Let’s get one thing straight: Safari 5’s Reader feature is not an ad-blocker. It’s no more prominent or enforced than clicking the RSS button in Safari’s address field. If you visit a page with a element of over 2,000 characters (I believe) Reader is made available for use - note that it’s not enabled automatically, much as some would love it.

This is why I do almost all my reading in Google Reader. It strips things down to content. You still get ads in the reader items, but generally only one ad per post, not the 20+ads running down the page on many sites.