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.

Um, Nothing new here..

[EMR]

So they integrated a "Readability" feature into the browser.. So what.. I've been using this for quite a while as a bookmarklet in Firefox..

http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/

Works great and does (nearly) the same thing.. (It doesn't pull in multiple page articles.)

Re:That Is a Feature

[thePig]

While this is funny - this is indeed what is going to happen in some time with the reader interface.
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. Why should they then spending their money, time and effort to create the web site contents?

So, either - as OP pointed out, they will intentionally sabotage reader mode or stop serving web pages to safari altogether. I would actually prefer the second option since I think this was a rather unethical thing to do from Apples part.

I am all for technology that enables users - google has shown the world how to provide the users with all support and then make money - for example they provided IMAP support in email, but then created such a beautiful mail interface that people I know use both thunderbird and web client. Thus, Google provide all support, and in turn they ask us to support them by at least viewing their unobstrusive ads.

I consider that a fair give and take. But what apple now has done is unfair - in my opinion. YMMV.

Force?

[dindi]

I do not think they try to force anything.

Just like Greasemonkey modifies web content, Safari offers and alternate view you can use when navigating to a page.

I, for one welcome innovation such as this one.

Arms race? You still go to the page, you still see the banners and the page structure (not missing an ad), THEN you can click on the "READER" in the address bar and bring up the reader interface.

I welcome the idea of reading an actual article without blinking SHIT all over the place, but then again, the blinking SHIT is there, so if you are interested in it, you can click on an ad.

And yes, I click on ads when they are worth clicking on, but I am completely sick of people masking google and other ads as contextual links. They barely take you to a page related to most documents.

Re:That Is a Feature

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But very clever, in an evil sort of way.

Anybody who develops for the web now has the choice of starving(if this catches on broadly), paywalling(good luck with that), or spinning a trivial mobilesafari-in-a-wrapper iDevice App, with the same content and Apple's unskippable iAds...

Re:Force?

[Shin-LaC]

You know, I used the reader feature for the first time while reading TFA, just to piss him off. But it doesn't look that useful to me. It doesn't start loading the next page until you scroll down to it, so you still have to stop and wait in the middle of your reading (unless you get in the habit of doing a quick scroll to the bottom in advance).
Also, there is no way of knowing what is being left out of the display, either by design or due to a parsing bug. How do I know that I'm not missing a paragraph or a sidenote? I think I would only use this feature on sites with extremely annoying designs, where the usability gain overrides those concerns. I think the best countermeasure for concerned webmasters is simply making sure their websites don't suck.

Re:That Is a Feature

[nine-times]

I would actually prefer the second option since I think this was a rather unethical thing to do from Apples part.

Unethical?

I'm not going to say you're wrong, but I think that idea needs to be fleshed out a bit more. Is it because you think ad-blockers are unethical? Or do you think it's generally unethical to reformat someone else's page? Or are you among those who suppose that this is part of a grand scheme to herd companies toward using iAds?

Re:Coincidence?

[silanea]

Safari only needs to have a reasonably high share within a certain target group for this to be a valid strategy. If the whole lot of Apple device users - Macs and i* combined - is essentially shielded from any ads but those served through iAd (or whatever the call it), that would indeed pose a significant issue for certain markets. It is not the death of the Interwebz, but I would not be so quick to dismiss this as a loony nutcase conspiracy theory.

Re:That Is a Feature

[Angostura]

Indeed. My take on this is that Reader could actually substantially diminish the need to install Adblock. This benefits the publishers since the whole page (including ads) loads and the user gets a chance to look at the full page before invoking reader.

Re:Tower of Babel

[azmodean+1]

haha, I guess you don't remember AOL, Compuserve or Prodigy. They tried that, and it didn't work out all that well for them.

Sure there are plenty of companies that want to lock their customers into their specific version of the internet, but fundamentally it's just too easy to get access to the real thing. Even if Safari started mangling pages sufficiently badly by default (which it is NOT doing right now), people could just move to other browsers. If it happened on one of Apple's locked-down platforms, sure it could cause some problems among that population, but they would still be free to switch to another platform that isn't as locked down.

Overall I see this as a reaction to an unsustainable business plan rather than anything else. Sure the timing is rather suspicious, but IMO the bad thing Apple is doing is the anti-competitive blocking of other players from its platform rather than some user-initiated reformatting of web pages.

Handy for use with screen readers

[mpaque]

For persons using screen readers to read web content (Apple VoiceOver, for example) the option to simplify the content of an article and automatically pull it together as a single page is wonderful.

Try closing your eyes and reading, via a text to speech system, a typical Forbes article broken across five pages packed with links, for example. This option or the Firefox Readability extension speeds things up something wonderful.

Reverse engineering is costly & (usually) wast

[sjbe]

The primary reason why reverse-engineering is almost never done is that you can't use the result anyway. Copyright prevents that.

Nonsense. If that were true IBM would still be the only maker of PCs. Compaq reverse engineered [wikipedia.org] the BIOS and the rest is history. Just because you reverse engineer something doesn't automatically mean a copyright violation. Reverse engineering happens legally every day. Patents can provide some protection against reverse engineering but copyright provides little in most cases.

With copyright gone, reverse engineering tools would become much much better.

Even if that were true (and I'm not conceding that it is - reverse engineering is and always will be hard) with copyright and patents there is no need for them. Why create an arms race those who want to hide code and those who want to reverse engineer it when with copyright and patents there is (generally) no need to do so? Your proposal would create additional incentives for people to hide their work instead of sharing it and we have enough problems with that already.