I forced Chrome for Android into reader mode, and it completely broke my habit of skimming articles

As someone who writes a lot for a living, I spend a lot of my day reading.

Between research, catching up on news, reading long-form features over here at Android Police and at other websites that I discover through social media, I consume far more text than the average person.

Yet despite reading constantly, I have noticed a bad habit. I tend to scan through articles instead of reading them fully. Most often, I would jump between headings and glance at full quotes and then continue further on.

That gave me a gist of the information, but not the depth of information that I needed. So, I forced myself to start using Reader Mode in Chrome for Android.

After forcing myself to use it for a few weeks, I realized that it has completely changed the way I read online for the better.

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By  Timi Cantisano

Modern websites make it easy to get distracted

Every page is competing for your attention

Now, before you say that I was just reading boring articles, that's absolutely not the case.

The content is well-written and worth spending time on. The challenge is that most websites are packed with distractions.

Now, I can't blame them. Their monetization is important, but between autoplay videos, related stories, and embedded social media posts, as well as things like newsletter signup boxes or advertisements, there is just too much visual overload for me.

Even on well-designed websites, the reading experience isn't really perfect.

I'd often open an article intending to spend five minutes reading it and somehow end up checking out three other stories before finishing the first one.

Reader mode helps you change that dynamic. When enabled, Chrome strips away nearly everything that isn't essential to the article itself.

The page becomes a simple reading surface focused almost entirely on the core of the text that you are reading and images.

There are no recommendation boxes sitting underneath every paragraph, and far fewer opportunities for my attention to drift.

The results are surprisingly similar to reading on an E-Ink reader, which is something I absolutely love.

It's completely changed how I consume information, and I started treating articles as a collection of facts. Highlights instead of complete pieces of writing, more so with longer articles.

Reader Mode turns articles into something you actually want to read

A cleaner page with fewer distractions

Getting Reader Mode up and running is deceptively simple. Open a website, tap the triple-dot menu in the upper-right corner, and select Show reading mode. That's all it takes to switch over into it.

After it kicks in, the biggest surprise isn't that reader mode looks cleaner — plenty of apps can help you make text look cleaner — it's how it cuts out all the distracting visual signals.

Instead of looking like a standard web page, full of distracting elements like ads and links to other articles, Reader Mode turns your page into a document that simply exists to be read.

That shift changes how you interact with it. I have found myself spending more time with individual articles because I am no longer constantly reminded that there are dozens of other things that I could be reading instead.

When that visual overload goes out the door, you end up reading articles all the way through much more often.

I no longer jump from heading to heading or just look at pull quotes embedded in the article. I'm grasping the full idea and the intention of the writer.

Reader mode in Chrome for Android also gives you a lot of control over the presentation.

You can adjust the text size or the spacing and appearance to make long-form reading much more comfortable. You get a choice of four different fonts that make text easier to see.

Additionally, depending on your preferences, you can swap between a white, beige, or black backdrop to make the text easier on your eyes.

These small changes matter much more than people realize.

Reading on a smartphone screen can be surprisingly fatiguing when typography isn't optimized for extended reading sessions.

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By giving your articles a Kindle-style stripped-down layout, complete with the ability to change fonts and text size, you are creating an environment that is conducive to reading rather than forcing yourself to adapt to whatever is thrown at you.

A better reading experience doesn't need a new app

One of the best parts of Reader Mode for Chrome on Android is that it doesn't require you to change browsers or install a new app.

You don't even need to adopt a new reading workflow, since this feature is built into the browser. All you have to do is enable it and use it consistently.

I initially turned it on because I wanted a cleaner interface for one website, but what I ended up getting was a completely different workflow for online reading.

It's something that, more often than not, I default to when I'm reading long form.

Most of us are constantly surrounded by content, be it articles, videos, or social media updates, and there is no realistic way for us to consume everything that we come across.

While Reader Mode doesn't solve that problem, it helps you focus on the piece that's directly in front of you and interests you.

For someone who reads much of the day, it's made a bigger difference than I would have anticipated, and while I still might skim through articles occasionally, I have found myself reading a lot more than I expected.