Readability - Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome
Very cool, excellent product, but I can’t help but think of how fucked up it is that this thing even needs to exist. Because here’s a novel idea: Hey Publishers: How about you just stop putting shit all over ever single pixel on the screen?
I’m always thinking about this, but have been even moreso lately, spurred in part by Felix Salmon opining about Gawker’s impending ditch of their ‘blog-style’ layout, in favor of a “big news site” type of layout (i.e., instead of having one central stream to follow, you have 9 zillion content snippets shouting at you from all over the screen).
I’m sure the whole infinite-clutter layout thing is mainly a product of scale (i.e. it probably doesn’t make sense for mega-content-generating workhorses like the NYT to present a simple stream of content (TimesWire notwithstanding)), but is it not nuts that someone had to invent a tool just so readers can comfortably read text on the web?
