Enable Chrome's Reader View manually, when it isn't offered? Is it possible to enable the "Reader View" of Chrome for Android, when Chrome doesn't offer it?



On iOS, Safari leaves the choice entirely to the user, who has to click a button – which is good, as Chrome's popup-bar is a bit distracting, and especially because it means that the user is free to enable it on any website.

In Firefox, the button isn't always offered, but display of the Reader mode can be forced with about:reader?url=URL, which can easily be turned into a bookmarklet.

But for Chrome, I couldn't find any option of forcing Reader View yet, and more often than not it isn't offered on the very articles, where it would help the most, such as those with bad color choices and overly obstrusive ads.
Technically, it is possible to request on-demand reader view (also known as "simplified view") on Chrome for Android.

Chrome uses DOM Distiller to determine if a page is worth to be simplified, then simplify and render it as a new page if requested.

There are a few ways to load a URL in reader view:


(Manual) from chrome://dom-distiller, a debug page that allows a user to input a URL and force load it in simplified mode.
(Possible idea for automation) a unique URL for every simplified page, which can be directly accessed from the address bar.

chrome-distiller://&lt;UUID&gt;_&lt;HASH&gt;/?url=&lt;URL&gt;


Where:


UUID: Universally unique identifier. By default, it uses UUIDv4 (random), but any UUID works, including nil UUID (00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000)
HASH: SHA-256 of URL
URL:  target URL (optionally, percent-encoded for safety).




Example URL for this page:

chrome-distiller://00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000_07036109224c60335e35e3b4c22dd02cf775f69d4430245c4c454aff570d6787/?url=https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/218970





Additional reading:


Ctrl blog - The many URI schemas used by the browsers’ “Reader Views”
Chromium.org Google Group - [Android] [Reader mode]Instant reader mode for new tab or WebView