[1]https://www.readability.com/bookmarklets/

I prefer having an extension/built-in tool to a bookmarklet, though.

(I'm sure others have made similar remarks about other features that were added over time that were originally in extensions)

A little icon appeared in the url bar on some website (it's orange when reader view is active, otherwise it's pale blue). I don't know how or why Firefox decides to show this icon. Even better, I just revisited the webpage in the screenshot annnd... no more reader view icon. SoFTWare.

ps: the reader view icon doesn't show anymore. FTWustrating.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400364

As for which WM specifically, it would be impossible to say for certainty since every one of them can be configured to look like the other - so only the OP would know for sure.

I'd speculate that you're right about Linux, but only because the article exampled was about ArchLinux. However that could be a red herring and the aforementioned WMs would also compile on most modern *nixes (or at the very least, a few of the notable BSDs)

In practice, I think we'd be better off darkening the background a little and lightening the foreground just a touch; #333 text on #F8F8F8 background still "feels" like black and white, but (assuming you've chosen a reasonable text size) it'll be a lot easier to read if you're dealing with long-form text.

Experiment, write this css into your dev tools:

    body * {
      color: #000 !important;
    }

Not really. Just learning about how to adjust preferences for FontConfig. Antialiasing, hinting and subpixel rendering have a lot of effect on the visual appearance especially. You can read about it here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Font_configuration#Font...

There can be also some monitor specific tweaks like LCD filtering.

More feature rich DEs give quite easy to use interfaces for managing all that (for example KDE). So if you are using some barebones DE / WM, then you should be ready to do all that manually in the config files.

The xml config files seems overly complex (I admit, I suffer from acute xml ad-formatem) for my tastes.

I tried to diff manjaro linux /etc/fontconfig actually, just to see what they were doing right to have such nice visuals and couldn't find anything.

It's in the same basket as some famous audio server, which I replaced by it's very naive ancestor.

About general idea of what all those settings are, here is a brief overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Font_rasterization

FontConfig rules can even be applied to Web fonts, which at times can be messed up by default. Example of such rule for fixing some mess on DuckDuckGo:

    <match target="font">
      <test name="family">
        <string>@font-face:DDG_ProximaNova</string>
      </test>
      <edit mode="assign" name="autohint">
        <bool>true</bool>
      </edit>
      <edit mode="assign" name="lcdfilter">
        <const>lcddefault</const>
      </edit>
    </match>

Without the rule: https://i.imgur.com/SsicEFJ.png

With the rule: https://i.imgur.com/Ehh0rZU.png

agreed ;)

I guess you haven't used Ubuntu lately, which ships with better fonts than my Windows machine.

Is not about font taste, is about brokenness, you can clearly see in the screenshot that the fonts are rendered poorly, some letters are lighter than others, half of a letter is lighter than the other half, some don't look smooth, etc...

Others have also mentioned that the subpixel order differs from monitor to monitor, so if the screenshot was taken on a monitor with BGR subpixels and your monitor has RGB subpixels, the text will look much, much, worse than if there had been no subpixel rendering at all. Or perhaps you, like me, have a CRT and subpixel rendering always looks wrong. It's hardly Firefox's fault.

I use debian and arch with http://www.infinality.net/blog/ and the fonts have never looked better.