Mercury Reader for Chrome: Now Even Better

Mercury Reader, our free Chrome extension for ad- and distraction-free reading online, got a fresh new update that provides an all-around better, cleaner experience for even more web sites.

Add it to Chrome now:

With Mercury Reader installed, you can:

• Remove ads and other clutter on any web page, leaving only text and images for a beautiful reading view, in one click.
• Format the Reader view the way you like: Change the typeface and text size, or turn on a dark theme.
• Send beautifully-formatted articles to your Kindle device with one click.
• Activate Reader with a key combination: Press Command + Esc to toggle the Mercury Reader view.

Since our last Mercury Reader release (over 2 years ago!), we’ve been hard at work on Mercury Parser, the software library that identifies the meaningful content on any page and removes the rest. We’ve implemented some big changes that we’re very excited about.

In particular, Mercury Parser is now free and open source, allowing anyone to read and improve on the code that powers Mercury Reader. And that is exactly what we and our many open-source contributors have done. We’re thrilled about the all the community members who’ve committed code and documentation to Mercury Parser. We’ve received over 120 custom parsers ranging from Wikipedia to the White House and have been humbled by the support and ingenuity. All of that work is now baked into Mercury Reader.

This new Mercury Reader release also features a variety of bug fixes and quality-of-life improvements to create a smoother and easier to use experience.

If you’re already using Mercury Reader, you’re already using this update. If you haven’t tried it yet, download it today–and developers, be sure to check out Mercury Parser, which is available for use in your own software projects.

Adam Pash is a Director of Engineering at Postlight heading up Postlight Labs efforts like Mercury and beyond. Want help making sense of big messy data? Get in touch: hello@postlight.com.