SpeedReader: Reader Mode Made Fast and Private
Mohammad Ghasemisharif, Peter Snyder, Andrius Aucinas and, Benjamin Livshits

TL;DR
SpeedReader integrates reader mode into the page rendering process to significantly enhance speed and privacy, achieving up to 27x faster load times, 84x bandwidth reduction, and fewer third-party trackers.
Contribution
It introduces a novel pipeline that applies reader mode during initial page load, enabling faster, more private browsing with high accuracy in page suitability prediction.
Findings
Achieves up to 27x speedup and 84x bandwidth reduction.
Predicts reader mode suitability with 91% accuracy.
Reduces third-party requests and trackers significantly.
Abstract
Most popular web browsers include "reader modes" that improve the user experience by removing un-useful page elements. Reader modes reformat the page to hide elements that are not related to the page's main content. Such page elements include site navigation, advertising related videos and images, and most JavaScript. The intended end result is that users can enjoy the content they are interested in, without distraction. In this work, we consider whether the "reader mode" can be widened to also provide performance and privacy improvements. Instead of its use as a post-render feature to clean up the clutter on a page we propose SpeedReader as an alternative multistep pipeline that is part of the rendering pipeline. Once the tool decides during the initial phase of a page load that a page is suitable for reader mode use, it directly applies document tree translation before the page is…
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Taxonomy
TopicsWeb Data Mining and Analysis · Caching and Content Delivery · Peer-to-Peer Network Technologies
