Last to Know

I’ll admit it.  I seem to go through life missing so much.

There’s nothing more embarrassing that going for a drive with my wife and asking her “Was that house always there?”  The look I get in return confirms that she really is a saint.

But, when I do clue in on good things, I’m so happy.

I had one of those moments this week.  I was bored and at my MacBook Pro and so decided to see if I was running the latest version of Firefox.  It turns out that I wasn’t.  I’m on the Beta channel and so there are often more updates than on the other channels.  Normally, I just sit there and get the notification the update had been done in the background and that all I have to do is restart.  Why I elected to check manually now, I have no idea.  It was a 60MB download so I knew that I was in for a fair wait with the slow internet connection that I have.

When I rebooted, life went on as per normal. I’m now running version 38.0.5.

I’m plugging away and I notice this little icon.

Was that always there?

I fire up Firefox on my Ubuntu computer, running version 37 and go to the same webpage.  Nada.

OK, it must be new.  I’d be best to look at the release notes.  I don’t see a reference to it.  There is some discussion that a reader mode would be available in version 39.  Am I looking at a work in process on the Beta channel?

Time for some investigation.  I give it a click on an open Hootsuite window and get this.

It looks like a Reader Mode.  It doesn’t work on all pages and seems to kick in intermittently.  Now, I’ve been a user of Evernote’s Clearly for a long time now.  I like reading in a clean, no-distraction environment.  If this is going to be an integral part of Firefox like it has been in Safari for a while, I’m all for it.

In the classroom, the concept is perfect.  Displaying a web page?  Steal the focus from the extraneous and get right to the content.

I just wish I could find a concrete reference to it.  It would be nice to know why it works on this page but not that.  Is there a configuration option?

More importantly, has it always been there?