Mercury Reader Removes the Clutter from Web Pages

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The Mercury Reader Chrome extension is a reader mode tool for cleaning off the clutter from web pages. It reformats the pages by removing distracting elements and leaving only text and images for a cleaner experience.

Mercury Reader is one of my must-have extensions and I use it daily.

Blog post reformatted with Mercury Reader
A post of my blog reformatted with Mercury Reader.

It’s installed on all my Chrome OS devices and it’s available whenever I need it. I can fire it up when visiting sites with tiny or illegible fonts, uncomfortable color combinations, pop-ups, excessively wide text margins, pages encrusted with ads, or with designs that interfere with reading. I don’t use a permanent ad-blocker, so Mercury Reader doubles as an on-demand ad blocker.

The extension removes distracting features such as navigation elements, sidebars, headers, and ads. Besides the images, it leaves only the text and sets it with clean fonts and attributes that make reading more pleasing.

Although it does a good job in most cases, some pages are so cluttered or have such intricate designs, that Mercury Reader doesn’t work well and generates a jumbled mess.

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