Mozilla Firefox features a “Reader View” mode that strips away advertisements, sidebars, and confusing layouts from web articles, presenting you with a clean, distraction-free page of text. When you visit a compatible article, a small page icon appears in the right corner of your URL address bar. While highly useful for reading long-form content, some users never use the feature and simply find the icon cluttering their address bar. If you prefer the standard web experience and want to remove the Reader View icon permanently, you can disable the feature entirely.
How to Disable Reader View Completely
Because there is no simple toggle in the standard settings, you must disable the feature through Firefox’s advanced configuration page.
- Open the Mozilla Firefox browser.
- Click on the main URL address bar at the top of the screen.
- Type about:config and press Enter.
- A warning page will appear. Click the Accept the Risk and Continue button.
- At the top of the configuration page, in the “Search preference name” box, type the following exactly: reader.parse-on-load.enabled
- The preference will appear below the search bar. You will see its current value is set to true.
- Click the Toggle button (the small icon with two arrows) on the far right.
- The value will immediately change to false.
The Reader View icon will instantly disappear from your URL address bar, and Firefox will no longer spend background processing power attempting to parse web pages for readability. If you ever want the feature back, simply return to this page and toggle the value back to true.