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mozilla
readability
JavaScript2015–2026
mozilla / readability

readability

A standalone version of the readability lib

66Distinct people
70Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
11.5KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A standalone version of the readability lib

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 5:03:38 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year70 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2015-02-24 16:35:34 UTC to 2026-04-12 08:34:17 UTC.

02468102015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20152016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 0 submissions, 4 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 10 mentions; 0 submissions, 10 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 7 mentions; 0 submissions, 7 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 1 submissions, 7 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 9 mentions; 2 submissions, 7 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 1 submissions, 2 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC404
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC10010
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC707
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC817
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC927
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC312

From the project README

An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 13, 2026.

Read the project’s introduction
Readability.js A standalone version of the readability library used for Firefox Reader View. Installation Readability is available on npm: npm install @mozilla/readability You can then require() it, or for web-based projects, load the Readability.js script from your webpage. Basic usage To parse a document, you must create a new Readability object from a DOM document object, and then call the parse() method. Here's an example: var article = new Readability(document).parse(); If you use Readability in a web browser, you will likely be able to use a document reference from elsewhere (e.g. fetched via XMLHttpRequest, in a same-origin <iframe> you have access to, etc.). In Node.js, you can use an external DOM library. API Reference new Readability(document, options) The options object accepts a number of properties, all optional: debug (boolean, default false): whether to enable logging. maxElemsToParse (number, default 0 i.e. no limit): the maximum number of elements to parse. nbTopCandidates (number, default 5): the number of top candidates to consider when analysing how tight the competition is among candidates. charThreshold (number, default 500): the number of characters an article must have in order to return a result. classesToPreserve (array): a set of classes to preserve on HTML elements when the keepClasses options is set to false. keepClasses (boolean, default false): whether to preserve all classes on HTML elements. When set to false only classes specified in the classesToPreserve array are kept. disableJSONLD (boolean, default false): when extracting page metadata, Readability gives precedence to Schema.org fields specified in the JSON-LD format. Set this option to true to skip JSON-LD parsing. serializer (function, default el => el.innerHTML) controls how the content property returned by the parse() method is produced from the root DOM element. It may be useful to specify the serializer as the identity function (el => el) to obtain a DOM element instead of a string for content if you plan to process it further. allowedVideoRegex (RegExp, default undefined ): a regular expression that matches video URLs that should be allowed to be included in the article content. If undefined, the default regex is applied. linkDensityModifier (number, default 0): a number that is added to the base link density threshold during the shadiness checks. This can be used to penalize nodes with a high link density or vice versa. parse() Returns an object containing the following properties: title: article title; content: HTML string of processed article content; textContent: text content of the article, with all the HTML tags removed; length: length of an article, in characters; excerpt: article description, or short excerpt from the content; byline: author metadata; dir: content direction; siteName: name of the site; lang: content language; publishedTime: published time; The parse() method works by modifying the DOM. This removes some elements in the web page, which may be undesirable. You can avoid this by passing the clone of the document object to the Readability constructor: var documentClone = document.cloneNode(true); var article = new Readability(documentClone).parse(); isProbablyReaderable(document, options) A quick-and-dirty way of figuring out if it's plausible that the contents of a given document are suitable for processing with Readability. It is likely to produce both false positives and false negatives. The reason it exists is to avoid bogging down a time-sensitive process (like loading and showing the user a webpage) with the complex logic in the core of Readability. Improvements to its logic (while not deteriorating its performance) are very welcome. The options object accepts a number of properties, all optional: minContentLength (number, default 140): the minimum node content length used to decide if the document is readerable; minScore (number, default 20): the minimum cumulated 'score' used to determine if the document is readerable; visibilityChecker (function, default isNodeVisible): the function used to determine if a node is visible; The function returns a boolean corresponding to whether or not we suspect Readability.parse() will succeed at returning an article object. Here's an example: /* Only instantiate Readability if we suspect the `parse()` method will produce a meaningful result. */ if (isProbablyReaderable(document)) { let article = new Readability(document).parse(); } Node.js usage Since Node.js does not come with its own DOM implementation, we rely on external libraries like jsdom. Here's an example using jsdom to obtain a DOM document object: var { Readability } = require('@mozilla/readability'); var { JSDOM } = require('jsdom'); var doc = new JSDOM("<body>Look at this cat: <img src='./cat.jpg'></body>", { url: "https://www.example.com/the-page-i-got-the-source-from" }); let reader = new Readability(doc.window.document); let article = reader.parse(); Remember to pass the page's URI as the url option in the JSDOM constructor (as shown in the example above), so that Readability can convert relative URLs for images, hyperlinks, etc. to their absolute counterparts. jsdom has the ability to run the scripts included in the HTML and fetch remote resources. For security reasons these are disabled by default, and we strongly recommend you keep them that way. Security If you're going to use Readability with untrusted input (whether in HTML or DOM form), we strongly recommend you use a sanitizer library like DOMPurify to avoid script injection when you use the output of Readability. We would also recommend using CSP to add further defense-in-depth restrictions to what you allow the resulting content to do. The Firefox integration of reader mode uses both of these techniques itself. Sanitizing unsafe content out of the input is explicitly not something we aim to do as part of Readability itself - there are other good sanitizer libraries out there, use the
Read the full README on GitHub

What Hacker News says

7 sources
I maintain something similar today, and I'm guessing that the OP uses some combination of the following libraries too (?): - Readability (https://github.com/mozilla/readability) to strip down the page's HTML to a bare minimum. - Turndown.js (https://github.com/mixmark-io/turndown) to convert the plain HTML to a markdown format with the GFM plugins enabled. - Puppeteer (https://github.com/puppeteer/puppeteer) to download the page. It costs me only several cents to parse an entire page, and I think OP can make some money out of this if they get the pricing right. Also, some unsolicited feedbacks on the API: - An option to enable/disable javascript would be great, since not all pages actually need to have it enabled to be parsable. - You can probably tweak the header of the headless browser to bypass the paywalls of some sites. Some are as s
Read the rest
imple as setting the useragent to a crawler bot (like `googlebot`). - Maybe an option to fill in the front matter (https://jekyllrb.com/docs/front-matter/) with a metadata given in the payload?
In Show HN: Extract Markdown, HTML or text from content-heavy websites
Do you accept feature requests/think this might be a good idea? I've been thinking about creating this + adding https://github.com/mozilla/readability to grab the links that are text articles and present them in-page (and cleaned up, just the text+images+similar, removing all the sidebars, popups, etc) instead of having to go to a 3rd party website with all the popups and such. It'd have to be either a personal website or a browser extension like yours, since I wouldn't be able to host a given article for anyone to read (for copyright reasons), but I can have a modified browser that loads a 3rd party article different.
In Show HN: I made a modern web UI for Hacker News
I've been working on several web extractors project, so I think I could share some of my findings while working on them. Granted it's been several months since I worked on it so I might be forgetting some things. There are several open source projects for extracting web contents. However, there are three extractors that I've worked with and give us good result: - readability.js[1], web extractor by Mozilla that used in Firefox. - dom-distiller[2], web extractor by Chromium team, written in Java. - trafilatura[3], Python package by Adrien Barbaresi from BBAW[4]. First, readability.js, as expected is the most famous extractor. It's a single file Javascript library with modest 2,000+ lines of code, released under Apache license. Since it's in JS, you can use it wherever you want, either in web page using `script` tag or by using it in Node p
Read the rest
roject. Next, DomDistiller is extractor that used in Chromium. It uses Java language with whopping 14,000+ lines of code and can only be used as part of Chromium browser, so you can't exactly use it as standalone library or CLI. Finally, Trafilatura is a Python package released under GPLv3 license. Created in order to build a text databases[5] for NLP research, it mainly intended for German web pages. However, as development continues, it works really great with other languages. It's a bit slow though compared to Readability.js. All of those three work in similar way: extract metadata, remove unneeded contents, and finally returns the cleaned up content. Their differences (that I remembered) are: - In Readability, they insist to make no special rules for any website, while DomDistiller and Trafilatura give a small exception for popular sites like Wikipedia. Thanks to this, if you use Readability.js in Wikipedia pages, it will shows `[edit]` button thorough the extracted content. - Readability has a small function to detect whether a web page can be converted to reader mode. While it's not really accurate, it's quite convenient to have. - In DomDistiller, the metadata extraction is more thorough than the others. It supports OpenGraph, Schema.org, and even the old IE Reading View mark up tags. - Since DomDistiller is only usable within Chromium, it has the advantage to be able to use CSS styling to determine if an element is important or not. If an element is styled to be invisible (e.g. `display: none`) then it will be deemed unimportant. However, according to a research[6] this step is actually doesn't really affect the extraction result. - DomDistiller also has an experimental feature to find and extract next page in sites that separated its article to several partial pages. - For Trafilatura, since it was created for collecting web corpus, it main ability is extracting text and the publication date of a web page. For the latter, they've created a Python package named htmldate[7] whose only purpose is to extract the publication or modification date for a web page. - Trafilatura also has an experimental feature to remove elements that repeated too often. The idea is if the element occured too often, then it's not important to the reader. I've found benchmark[8] that compare the performance between the extractors, and it said that Trafilatura has the best accuracy compared to the others. However, before you start rushing to use Trafilatura, you should remember that Trafilatura is intended for gathering web corpus, so it's really great for extracting text content, but IIRC is not as good as Readability.js and DomDistiller for extracting a proper article with images and embedded iframes (depending on how you look, it could be a feature though). By the way, if you are using Go and need to use a web extractor, I already ported all three of them to Go[9][10][11] including their dependencies[12][13], so have fun with it. [1]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability [2]: https://github.com/chromium/dom-distiller [3]: https://github.com/adbar/trafilatura [4]: https://www.bbaw.de/en/ [5]: https://www.dwds.de/d/k-web [6]: https://arxiv.org/abs/1811.03661 [7]: https://github.com/adbar/htmldate [8]: https://github.com/scrapinghub/article-extraction-benchmark [9]: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability [10]: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-domdistiller [11]: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-trafilatura [12]: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-htmldate [13]: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-dateparser
In How does Firefox's Reader View work? (2020)

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