Focus Mode

How to unlock Focus Mode in Cheevos by using Firefox Reader View to strip a page to its content. Worth 10 XP.

The story

Partner. You stripped a page down to the part that actually mattered.

Most webpages arrive dressed up in things that have nothing to do with what you came to read. Sidebars. Autoplay videos. Newsletter pop-ups asking for your email before you've read a single sentence. Ads competing for the same six inches of screen as the actual article. Reader View reaches in and removes all of it, leaving just the text and the images that belong to it.

Cache thinks about curation the same way. The Stash is enormous, chaotic, and stuffed with things most people would call clutter, but every single item earned its spot through the same process: remove the noise, keep the signal. He does this by hand, one object at a time, forever. Reader View does it to a webpage in under a second.

He considers this one a kindred skill. You saw a page buried in noise and you chose to see through it instead. That is exactly the instinct that built the Stash in the first place.

The catalog entry

READER VIEW ACTIVATED Acquired: Used Firefox Reader View to strip a page to its content. Condition: Distraction-free. Rarity: Uncommon. Cache's Notes: Reader View removes everything that is not the text. The ads. The pop-ups. The sidebars. What is left is the actual thing. Cache considers this a curation tool. He does the same thing with items in the Stash. Remove the noise. Keep the signal. This is good practice.

Spoiler: how to unlock it

Reader View is a single click away on eligible pages.

  1. Navigate to an article-style webpage (a news story or blog post works well).
  2. Look for the small open-book icon at the right side of the address bar. If the page qualifies, it will appear automatically.
  3. Click it to switch into Reader View.

Reader View, also called Reader Mode, uses Firefox's built-in readability engine to detect the main article content on a page and re-render it in a clean, distraction-free layout, stripping out ads, navigation menus, sidebars, and most scripts. It only appears on pages the browser detects as article-like content, so it won't show up on things like search results or app dashboards. Within Reader View you can also adjust font size, line spacing, and color theme, and even have the page read aloud using text-to-speech. Chromium-based browsers offer a comparable feature at chrome-distiller: under various names, though implementation and availability differ by browser.

Where it fits in the Stash

Cache keeps this filed next to his own instincts about curation, proof that stripping something down to its essentials is a skill worth having, not just a raccoon quirk. To learn more about the archivist who lives by that rule, read the story.