Android's Mobile Chrome "Show simplified view"

undetectable in UA string

[keyplyr]

Many browsers, especially mobile, now have a feature that will strip away "excess" and show the reduced version of a page to the user, presumably for faster viewing. It's clear to see that browsers are developed for the user and *not* the website owner.

Mobile Chrome on Android* (the world's most used mobile OS) displays across the bottom of the screen the option to "Show simplified view" even on fast loading pages. This chosen... gone are all ads, all navigation, most links, most CSS enhancements, most scripting, etc.

This is done from the mibile Chrome browser's cache and additional requests to the page are not needed - thus there are no identifiable attributes added or changed to the UA string, which makes it undetectable just how many users are doing this while at our websites.

*Added in Android 8.0

[edited by: keyplyr at 9:56 am (utc) on Oct 8, 2018]

[justpassing]

I don't know if it works the same way as the "Reader View" of Firefox. But if you have to activate it "after" entering the page, then it means people had the time to see your above the fold ads.

By the way, for some reasons, activating the Reader View (Firefox) at any of my sites is resulting in pages totally unreadable. Often, only the first paragraph is showing, the remain of the page is stripped out (in spite of the fact that I do not add ads within paragraph at all) , and when more paragraphs are shown, it happens that some are out of order ?! As a result it makes my pages looks like all these scraper sites, which are randomly mixing paragraph from other sites ...

I can't think of what I am doing, from a layout point of view, to mess so much the Reader view of Firefox. Hopefully, people are first seeing "my" pages, otherwise they'll think my site is broken.

[keyplyr]

Good news with Reader View is that Firefox is not widely used. Techies here use Firefox, but it is less than 5% of my traffic across my 3 sites.

But yes, very similar to the "Show simplified view" in Chrome on Android. The Firefox reader view doesn't alter the UA either, so it can't be blocked by normal technique.

PocketParser and GetPocket at least identify in the UA string so they can easily be blocked, just like Google's first tries with Webview and the older Transcoder.

[keyplyr]

Just discovered that Android 8.0 added a setting checkbox for "Show simplified view" to be turned off. Now I don't have to keep closing that irritating message on everyone's pages.

[lucy24]

Reader View isn't unique to Firefox. Safari on my iPad often (but not universally) offers it. It's ugly, but it really is useful when all you want is the text of an article.

[keyplyr]

Note that the discussion concerns *mobile* Chrome and related mobile browser features.

I make this distinction becauss there are significant differences between Desktop and Mobile browsers, especially with their features.

[lucy24]

Do iPads no longer count as mobile?

[keyplyr]

So we're talking browsers, not devices.

I don't know about Apple products (I've never used one) but the Chrome browser on my Windows Surface tablet is a different browser than the Chrome browser on my Android phone.

Are they in fact the same (including the various settings/features) on different Apple products?