At WWDC today, Apple announced the addition of a new “Reader” feature to Mobile Safari on iOS. The feature will be all-too-familiar to users of the popular Instapaper app. It allows users to instantly view a cleaned-up version of the website they are currently viewing in Safari, without any ads, and with far better formatted text for easy reading. Additionally, the new reader feature appears to sync across all of your iOS devices, and will most likely sync with your Mac as well. This essentially eliminates the need for services like Instapaper, Readability, and Read It Later.
Furthermore, the service eliminates all ads from whatever page you’re reading. Time will tell how advertisers and content publishers react to this move by Apple, but it has been a long time coming, as the user experience of most news websites has degraded to a miserable state over time. Users are constantly bombarded with ugly, flashing banner ads, and are only given a narrow strip of content down the left side of the page. The content is often further divided across several pages, in order to increase ad views for the content publisher. This all adds up to create a miserable reading experience, which Apple and these other services are trying to fix. Reader, in addition to existing services such as Instapaper and Read It Later, eliminate all adds seamlessly, while dramatically increasing the quality of the reading experience for the user. This is a very welcome feature to see in iOS, and the sync functionality will improve the experience further still.
The feature also allows the user to save a series of webpages for later viewing in this new cleaned-up view. This will allow users to save things that they don’t have time to read at the moment, and read them at their liesure. The best part of this feature is that it automatically syncs across devices, allowing you to pick up your iPad and resume reading where your iPhone left off. This is fantastic, and it has been a long time coming.
Additionally, Apple announced that they will be bringing normal tabbed browsing to Safari on the iPad, so that the iPad and Mac versions of Safari will have consistent user interfaces. All of these features combine to make the reading and browsing experiences on the iPad, iPhone and Mac dramatically better.
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