Apple just made one of Safari’s best features even better. Whether you’re using an iPhone or iPad with iOS 11 or Safari 11 on a Mac, you can now make Safari always open articles on any website in Reader Mode. This is perfect if there’s a site with content you love, but design choices you absolutely despise. Reader Mode is one reason why every Mac user should ditch Chrome for Safari.
Automatically Use Reader Mode on an iPhone or iPad
Setting this up on an iPhone or iPad is easy: just head to the site in question and long-press the Reader View button in the address bar. Note that this button only shows up on pages with an article.
Tap “Use on [Current Website]” or “Use on All Websites” and Safari will always open articles on either the current website or the entire web in Reader View. Of course, web pages will only open in Reader View if Safari recognizes them as articles, so some web pages will be unaffected.
To undo this change, long-press the Reader View button again and select either the “Stop Using on [Current Website]” or “Stop Using on All Websites” option.
You can use this feature to opt a few websites out of Reader Mode, too. For example, you could enable Reader Mode for all websites and then tell Safari not to use Reader Mode on a single, specific website. Articles from that specific website will always open as normal web pages, but articles on the rest of the web will continue to open in Reader Mode.
Even when using Automatic Reader View, you can just tap the Reader View button in the address bar to temporarily view the current page as a normal web page.
Automatically Use Reader Mode on a Mac
On a Mac, head to the site in question and right-click the Reader Mode button in the address bar. This button only shows up if the current page is an article, so navigate to an article on the website if you don’t see it.
You’ll see the option to “Use Reader Automatically” on this particular domain.
Click this and you’re done: every article you open on that domain will automatically open in Reader Mode.
It’s hard to overstate how much better this can make reading a site. Not only is the clutter gone, but you can also customize the font style, font size, and color scheme to your liking.
Want to stop using Reader Mode for a particular site? Open the site you want to configure, then click Safari > Settings For This Website in the menu bar.
This will show you the Safari settings for the website you currently have open.
Uncheck “User Reader when available” and Reader Mode will stop turning on automatically for that domain.
If the menu bar takes too long, you can add a button to Safari’s toolbar to access this window: just right-click the toolbar, then drag the “Website Preferences” button wherever you want it.
There’s one more way to configure this: in the Safari preferences, which you can find in the menu bar: Safari > Preferences. Head to the “Websites” tab and you’ll see a list of sites with Reader enabled; toggle them as you see fit.
From here you can disable the feature for sites en masse.
