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Make Medium Readable Again

297 points| thangngoc89 | 8 years ago |chrome.google.com

179 comments

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[+] outsidetheparty|8 years ago|reply
I've been using a bookmarklet that simply removes all fixed-position elements from the page; it makes Medium and plenty of other sites tolerable.

This is it:

  javascript:(function()%7B(function%20()%20%7Bvar%20i%2C%20elements%20%3D%20document.querySelectorAll('body%20*')%3Bfor%20(i%20%3D%200%3B%20i%20%3C%20elements.length%3B%20i%2B%2B)%20%7Bif%20(getComputedStyle(elements%5Bi%5D).position%20%3D%3D%3D%20'fixed')%20%7Belements%5Bi%5D.parentNode.removeChild(elements%5Bi%5D)%3B%7D%7D%7D)()%7D)()
[+] mastazi|8 years ago|reply
Unfortunately Medium has some specific problems, besides fixed elements, that make it user-unfriendly, for example the lazy loading "feature". OP's extension can fix that.
[+] mayneack|8 years ago|reply
As a serial selecter, I wish it would get rid of the popup when you select text. https://imgur.com/G5x0U9P
[+] have_faith|8 years ago|reply
Fellow serial selector here. Is there a formal name for what we do?
[+] programbreeding|8 years ago|reply
If you use ublock origin or similar, block the following element: ##.highlightMenu
[+] alpb|8 years ago|reply
I think the extension should handle this too. It's to annoying to pass on
[+] thebaer|8 years ago|reply
Hey, creator here. This is also available for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/make-medium-r...

And feel free to suggest any improvements, or submit a pull request on GitHub! https://github.com/thebaer/MMRA

[+] mastazi|8 years ago|reply
Thank you for making this, in particular thank you for the "disable lazy loading" option, which I have always found annoying when I'm on a slow connection (which is very often since I'm in Australia).
[+] ptyyy|8 years ago|reply
Thank you for this. Next step: making it so that if I browse on a 2560x1440 monitor, the content uses more than only 30% of the window.
[+] hardwaresofton|8 years ago|reply
Hope someone from Medium is reading this thread -- there's a problem with your product if people who want to go to your site to take time and read consider your site unreadable.
[+] paulie_a|8 years ago|reply
I appreciate the creators efforts here, but honestly medium just needs to get their shit together. I use Reddit enhancement suite because it adds features. This just makes a basic blogging platform useable for reading. Personally I've just opted to not use medium any more.
[+] saagarjha|8 years ago|reply
On Safari and Firefox we have a built-in way to remove distractions like these, such as Reader mode. A cynical viewpoint on why Chrome doesn’t offer this is that doing this would prevent you from seeing Google’s ads.
[+] rwc|8 years ago|reply
Don't think any cynicism at all is required to arrive at this conclusion.
[+] ender7|8 years ago|reply
Reader mode exists on Chrome for Android, so this is most likely a feature that mainline Chrome hasn't gotten around to rather than some nefarious plan :)
[+] notatoad|8 years ago|reply
Chrome on Android seems to have a reader mode. They don't call it that, it's called "simplified page" or something like that, but it's basically the same thing as FF and safari's reader mode.

And they even prompt to use it, which isn't something I've seen Firefox do.

[+] PKop|8 years ago|reply
Try this chrome flag to enable reader mode option:

chrome://flags/#reader-mode-heuristics

[+] flukus|8 years ago|reply
As much as I love reader mode, with this and the various other work arounds in this thread are we actually enabling them to make bad UI's? Avoiding sites like this might be a much better solution in the long term.
[+] IncRnd|8 years ago|reply
The past has shown that cynicism is realistic when discussing whether ads or altruism are the motivation of google.
[+] gnicholas|8 years ago|reply
The pictured hackernoon banners are especially visually intrusive. Hackernoon also inserts text and image ads (inline) to some of the posts that contributors make. The contributor is not notified of these edits, and chrome extensions like this won’t catch them (and they are also neon green).

It might be good for their branding if my primary takeaway were positive, not annoyed.

[+] detaro|8 years ago|reply
I always find it weird if a link shows up on twitter or HN and then a few days later it appears again, now suddenly under this generic "hackernoon" branding. Medium is bad enough at hiding author identity, mixing the good with the crap, but hackernoon adds another layer and I just don't get it.
[+] kmfrk|8 years ago|reply
I don’t for the life of me understand the people who write about programming on Medium when the CMS doesn’t even have native syntax highlighting.

I wish I could tell people it’s straightforward to migrate from Medium, but it involved a lot of annoying copy-pasting when I did it.

Sooner is better than later, though. Call it markup debt if you well.

[+] drunkkcunt|8 years ago|reply
https://dev.to is such a great alternative to Medium for programming posts. I really wish it catches up and becomes more popular
[+] arnaudsm|8 years ago|reply
Medium was specifically created because of bloated blogs. It has become the very thing it ought to destroy.
[+] amelius|8 years ago|reply
Note: this plugin can read and change all the data on the websites you visit.
[+] erichurkman|8 years ago|reply
Extensions that do this terrify me. Imagine a popular Chrome extension, say, Fireshot, with 2 million active installs, selling out. The next update of the app gets shipped with a screen scraper that looks at coinbase.com. Some time after you've last visited your dashboard, it opens a connection on some entirely unrelated site and posts to the 'send' page to send all of your BTC to a third party address.

Or if you have 2FA enabled for sends, just intercept the send POST with an address of your choice, but display the user's originally input address on the confirmation screen. To make it even more confusing, keep a list of transactions:intended accounts so any time the user looks on _any_ bitcoin site it shows the transaction was going to the right account.

[+] dictum|8 years ago|reply
Without reading the source, I reckon this is because not all Medium blogs are under medium.com subdomains, so you can't request access only to *.medium.com in the extension manifest.
[+] kmfrk|8 years ago|reply
One of the things I can’t understand as a Chrome user and developer is how limited your options for explicit extension permissions are. Either people will not install extensions (basically my case), or the Chrome team will teach people to ignore warnings and extensive permissions not unlike what we used to do with SSL/Mixed Content warnings. (Which I guess is what they already do on Android, but still.)

Firefox also had to learn about the vulnerability of Firefox extensions the hard way, but training users to scrutinize permissions would be a great opportunity.

[+] ashelmire|8 years ago|reply
Can't any extension do this? They all insert javascript onto pages and they can interact with your browser directly. That's like saying "this extension can do exactly what every other extension can do".
[+] dotmanish|8 years ago|reply
Extensions can specify if they want read/change access to only one domain (or more). This extension could have specified medium.com alone.
[+] amelius|8 years ago|reply
Better idea: make the internet readable again.

Perhaps using a combination of AI/ML and collaborative raw-text extraction.

[+] fancyfacebook|8 years ago|reply
I've gotten so used to right clicking and removing the offensive parts of websites in ublock origin that I always find it shocking just how bad the web is on a new machine. So many banners, so many subscription lists, so many useless social bars.

It's also kind of silly that I have four different extensions just to shield myself from how bad the web has gotten. I feel like I'm going under red alert every time I want to check my email.

[+] pmlnr|8 years ago|reply
> every time I want to check my email.

Ever considered using a non-web email client? K9, Tunderbird, Evolution, Kmail, Geary, mutt, alpine, etc?

[+] dredmorbius|8 years ago|reply
There's also CSS extensions such as Stylus.
[+] B1FF_PSUVM|8 years ago|reply
Sheesh, why do we need tools for user-hostile layouts?

I hate reading between slats on Medium, don't they realize that?

What's their incentive for it?

[+] codedokode|8 years ago|reply
Every time I visit medium, it shows a popup reminding me how much times I visited it before. Do they want to make me feel guilty for visiting too often?
[+] rayalez|8 years ago|reply
I have made a stylish stylesheet with a similar purpose:

https://userstyles.org/styles/150108/medium-custom

But it is more focused on the writing experience.

I really love medium's editor, but I wanted a dark theme (more comfortable for the eyes), and to remove all the clutter so I could focus on no-distractions writing.

I hope you'll find it useful =)

[+] Rskeats|8 years ago|reply
I have found a Chrome extension over a month ago called "Sticky Header Hider aka Fixed Header Fixer" by Emojistuff which works very well. Yesterday I found the other one "Make Medium Readable again" by A Bunch Tell when I changed my search term from "Sticky Headers etc" to dickbars and found I am not the only one being tormented by those things. I also see another extension for Apple called Unobstruct.

I like the option "Disable lazy image loading". I have noticed that. I thought it was for constantly loading of adverts.

Pleased to see something done about this annoying practice.

They think I am so stupid that I can't locate the navigation bar so they have to ram in my face/fixed line of site constantly.

So nice to have the freedom back without any work in hiding things with Adblock or clicking that bookmark for most sites.