Feb 15, 2026

I keep playing with the Reader project. I learned that I can’t fetch a website using Javascript fetch. That I can’t fetch pages through iframes. All for security reasons. I can’t fetch HTML on the server side, because with the current AI crawling environment, plenty of platforms block it.

The bookmarklet allows running arbitrary Javascript, and works in practice, but Safari doesn’t let adding bookmarklets to the toolbar. There’s a workaround with favourites toolbar, but then you gotta have another horizontal row for just this toolbar.

Basically, the only technically feasible way to reformat arbitrary website the way I want it to look is to make a browser extension. Something I wouldn’t tackle before Codex. I learned that you can make an extension for Chrome and Firefox by adding a standard manifest.json, which is pretty reasonable approach. Of course, to make it available to others you need to have a paid extension marketplace account, and go through the hoops of review and what not. Then I learned that for Safari extension, the same functionality involves like 20 files, mostly scaffolded by XCode. A ton of bullshit, and signing, and I managed to have a Safari extension as well.

The way extension works:

1. Open a website (with one extractable main content element), and you don’t like how it looks.

2. Click the circle icon in the browser toolbar.

3. Enjoy the distraction-free reading experience with large font and the best color scheme ever existed.