The Electric Educator: Replacing Readability with Purify

Saturday, November 19, 2016

Replacing Readability with Purify

UPDATE 12/26/2016: I'm happy to announce that Readability will live on as "Mercury Reader." If you previously installed Readability, you will notice that the icon has changed, but it will continue to work as before. If you don't have Mercury, head over to the webstore and get it! 

Readability, one of my favorite Chrome extensions, will be shut down on December 10, 2016. You can read their announcement here.  Readability is one more in a long line of web-based tools that, while popular, did not have a monetization plan and were unable to continue development and support of their free service.

Readability was a tremendous tool for helping students access content without all of the clutter and garbage found on most major news sites.

After hearing of the impending shutdown of readability I spent quite a bit of time searching for alternatives. I tried out a lot of different extensions, but only one came even close to providing the simplicity and effectiveness of Readability.

If you are a Readability user, I recommend that you begin using Purify.

Purify Chrome Extension

Purify strips out all of the advertisements, videos, related stories and links that you tend to find on news sites. Purify is unique in that it pulls the content into columns and forces the user to scroll right / left rather than one long column like Readability. Purify does not provide any sharing or save for later options. It does offer the ability to change the font size and style. 





Purify is a solid replacement for Readability and the only decent replacement that I have been able to find. If you have other alternatives, please let me a comment!

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