Alex Johnson – Journalist at Large

(Fun update at the end!)

Besides its speed, which is real and impressive, the big feature everyone seems to be touting in Apple’s new Safari 5 is something called Reader, which strips a page to its simple text. Setting aside the hand-wringing over whether it Presages the Death of Ads (© Every Blogger With a Media Job Inc.), the truly impressive thing about Reader is how Apple has swallowed a simple java bookmarklet, which already works in Chrome, IE, Firefox and as far as I know Netscape 1, and spit it back out to Apple fanboys as some major advance.

People, this is just Arc90’s Readability bookmarklet, or a very convincing ripoff. If you’re reading this in any other flavor of browser, you can enjoy the exact same utility. It’s free, and it’s at http://lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability/.

Screenshots after the jump.

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