The web has been plagued by cookie consent popups and banners since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has come into effect. See for yourself when you visit articles like this and this. Now what if I told you there is a one-click solution to hide those banners and make your reading experience on websites such as these examples a lot simpler?

I’m talking about the “reader mode”. When available for a website, it is displayed as an icon at the end of the url bar in Firefox. The same is true for Chrome, but you first need to enable it at chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode. Safari on iOS includes it in the menu at the left of the url bar.

Now open the first example again and click on the reader icon without acknowledging the cookie consent popup. That’s better, right? As an added benefit you get dark mode and typography settings as well.

I believe not a lot of users know about this button, especially because Chrome doesn’t want to show it by default. As you can imagine it’s quite a life saver for informative sites and articles that you just want to read and don’t care about further interacting with.

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