"Reading View" Bookmarklet for Microsoft Edge

Update [20-Aug-21] - This bookmarklet originally worked in the way described for an older version of Edge.  Edge has since changed to work more like Chrome, so while most of the article is still relevant the re-purposed links won't open automatically. The links changed by bookmarklet have to be copied and pasted.
---

I love the "Reading View" feature in Edge. It lets you focus on the main content of a web page by removing irrelevant parts. Reading view can be toggled on or off from the Reading view (book icon) button on the address bar (or with Ctrl + Shift + R).
I noticed that when a web page is open in Reading view, there is a "read:" operator prefixed to the URL in the address bar.

This made me wonder if there is a way to have all pages open in Reading view by default. This cannot be done automatically but I figured an initial trigger can be provided through a Bookmarklet ( from more info, check my other Bookmarklet posts). So if you're on the home page of a newspaper website, the links on that page can be prepped to open in Reading view in a new tab on clicking it.

Currently there is no way to drag and drop a Bookmarklet to the Favorites/Bookmark bar as it can be done on other popular browsers. Hopefully this will be added in future versions of Edge but for now I had to use a hack to add my Bookmarklet to Favorites.  -  From the time this was written, Edge has  changed to work more like Chrome so just drag and drop the Bookmarklet to the Favorites bar

Add any web page to Favorites. Once added, it can be renamed and the original URL has to be replaced with the Bookmarklet code written in JavaScript.

Make sure to press enter rather than clicking outside the Favorite-d Bookmarklet The following is a readable version of the above crunched (to remove spaces) code:

To see this Bookmarklet in action, use it on some web page that has a lot of links by selecting this Bookmarklet from Favorites by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + I or by clicking on the Favorites icon next to the address bar.

Notice that the links acquire a grey background & clicking on such links will open it in a new tab in Reading view mode.
This Bookmarklet has been tested in Edge version 44

Comments