Extension Watch: SimplyRead for Chromium and Firefox

Productivity Sauce

After going through several browser extensions that make reading long articles on the web more tolerable, I've finally settled for SimplyRead. Why? For several reasons. The extension is released under an open source license and it's available for both Google Chrome (and Chromium) as well as Firefox.

SimplyRead does a commendable job of pulling out and formatting relevant text from most web pages. According to the extension's developer, SimplyRead is inspired by the Readability project, but it "aims to be much simpler, faster, and more usable." The extension doesn't offer any embellishments like the ability to share the sscurrently viewed web page via Twitter or Facebook, and you can't tweak the default styling, either. However, SimplyRead does the job, and that's what counts.