Reader mode is the browser quietly admitting the page failed
Think about what reader mode actually does. You open an article and the page fights you — cookie banner, a newsletter popup two seconds in, a sticky header eating the top third, things still shifting around as ads load. So you hit reader mode, the browser throws all of it away and hands you the text. And it's better. Faster, calmer, easier to actually read.
That's a strange button to need. It's the browser looking at a site's own design and deciding it can do better by deleting most of it. When the stripped-down fallback beats the real page, the real page was never really a design — it was a delivery vehicle for everything wrapped around the words.
The sizes are the part that gets me. A few kilobytes of text routinely arrive inside multiple megabytes of scripts: analytics, a tag manager, ad exchanges, a whole framework whose job is to render text that was already text. Page weight is easy to ignore because the person shipping it has a fast laptop on office wifi. The bill lands on whoever's on an old phone or one bar of signal.
I don't think it's laziness exactly. Some of the weight buys real things, and devices got fast enough that there's slack, so the slack gets spent. But "there's headroom" is how you get here one script at a time, until the fast path is the one that strips your work back out.
Is a genuinely light web still possible as a default, or is it now something you opt into — reader mode, a blocker, and a bit of hope?
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