Readability

Perennial favorite blog resourceshelf pointed out a great web tool, Readability, which has the ability to declutter, streamline and customize pages to increase their, well, readability. You may think installing another tool in order to avoid clutter seems silly. If, however, you are anything like me, and you struggle with trying to accomplish satisfactory in-depth reading online due to all of the poopoo flung in the sidebars and in-between paragraphs on most sites... Readability may well be for you.

Here's an example of the detritus that Readability removes, from a book review at the New York Times, the first is the page as normal:




And here's the page after invoking Readability:



Much cleaner, and less distraction! Hyperlinks are bumped down to footnotes, pics are gone, and the text fills the screen in luscious, black-on-white readability! Scrumptious!

Installation of Readability is very easy (took me about ten seconds on Google Chrome). Here's the video on installation from the company:

Readability - Installation Video for Firefox, Safari & Chrome from Arc90 on Vimeo.