Safari Reader

Great minds think alike, or so they say. In this case, Slaw and Steve Jobs (well, Apple, really) have come up with pretty much the same thing: a way to make your web reading a whole lot easier. Apple released Safari 5 yesterday, the latest iteration of its browser (available for both Windows and Mac operating systems); among the other improvements you’ll find (such as increased speed, and the possibility of extensions) will be Reader. When the browser believes you’re reading an article — how it knows, I don’t know: a long stretch of text, presumably — it offers you an icon in the location bar clicking on which presents you with the article as an overlay in larger type and stripped of inessential sidebar material (such as ads, by the way: a source of some consternation). The image below (click on it to enlarge it) shows you Connie’s recent article as presented in Safari Reader:

Slaw has had this feature for some time now, under the title EasyReader. Clicking on the little document icon at the upper right of any entry will do the same thing in any browser (with Javascript on). Here again is Connie’s article done our way:

Of course, as everyone knows, I’m an unashamed Mac fanboy, so if you were to switch to Safari and never to bother with Slaw’s EasyReader, that wouldn’t fuss me much. Come to think of it, so long as you read Slaw, I’m pretty much good with however that happens.