[hhsbz]

I never use it because I know the process is automatic and I'm always afraid I will be missing part of the text or the pictures.

I've found ad blockers to be more or less competent in removing the stupid European banners, but they are far from flawless. Some sites get stuck without a scroll bar for example

[hlasdjlfhalwjk]

> I'm always afraid I will be missing part of the text or the pictures

As for missing pictures, my argument is, either the text is referring to an image that cannot be seen in reader mode, then I'll notice and switch back to normal mode to see the image, or the image is not relevant to the text, so I just don't care for it.

[aerojoe23]

I use it for the text to speech in Firefox a lot. When there isn't a pay wall in the way I'll open the page in another tab while reader read's it to me.

This way I can see the text and pictures the way they intended it to be.

Another downside is that text content for other articles on the site that aren't part of the article, will be in the content. On the full site they'll be links or something and you just skip them with out thinking. In text to speech reader mode, it reads them off.

[dredmorbius]

There's no risk in invoking Reader Mode. If it doesn't render or omits text, you can simply toggle it off / navigate back to the native page.

Images in online articles are irrelevant the overwhelming majority of the time --- 75%--95% or more. At best they're eye-candy or distractions. They occasionally provide context. Some serve as a contextual reminder. I'd suggest that information-critical graphics (there's information in the image that's not available from the article itself) are in the neighbourhood of 1% of all images. These tend to be graphs, plots, charts, or maps.

They're also generally rendered by Reader Mode, unless the site is very poorly designed.

TL;DR: This is an irrelevant concern.

[perryizgr8]

This is exactly why I don't use it either. Sometimes I have noticed that diagrams/images are stripped out. Sometimes a couple paragraphs at the end will be omitted.

[sidpatil]

I've noticed the same thing. Nowadays I quickly check the end of the article before switching to reader mode, to make sure it's still there.

[frenkel]

You should give it a try, I've never noticed any important parts missing.

[q-rews]

I use Safari’s reader mode on Medium and it fails to load lazy-loaded images (unsurprisingly) so if I want to see those, I have to scroll down first and then enable the mode.

[kzrdude]

Sometimes images are missing. Especially banner images, of course, and sometimes those illustrate the story, but I think also background-level images (that are used for non-background purposes, if you miss them, of course).