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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, 4:01:40 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
> it didn't even occur to me that I could add some ad hoc logic to fetch the article HTML from js, pass it to readability and insert the in the UI I don't know what you mean by "ad hoc". Again, Readability was written to run in the browser. It operates on the DOM, not HTML. If there's anything ad hoc going on, it would be (a) the fake DOM that Gijs wrote[1] so you can run it when all you have is HTML instead of an object graph, and (b) logic involved in shelling out to a separate NodeJS process from Python. These are hacks on top of hacks. > which I guess is what you suggest I wasn't suggesting anything. I'm making an observation about how illogical the JS,-therefore-Node cliché is. If I were going to suggest anything, it would be "don't use Readability" since it isn't a good fit for this use case. If "use Readability" were a requi
Read the rest
rement, then I would suggest, for the benefit of yourself and your brethren, rewriting Readability in Python or creating a binary Python module using either QuickJS and Readability plus Gijs's fake DOM, or Haxe. 1. <https://github.com/mozilla/readability/blob/main/JSDOMParser...>
In Reclaiming the web with a personal reader
> I think too many techies are, much like yourself, contributing to the problem by refusing to move away from Chrome [...] Contrary to your assumptions, I've been quite vocal against the Chrome/Blink monoculture for a while. Unfortunately there is a legit case for it; several generations of "low-end" devices (anything older than 10 years basically), that are still quite capable and in common use, where the difference in performance between Firefox and Chromium becomes quite noticeable, especially as you try to watch video. I don't think the problem is "techies", we have zero influence outside our own circles - see the historical rates of Linux adoption. The problem is we need the good ol' hammer of antitrust to start swinging again. We also need the regulators to be smart; if we get really unlucky, they will target iOS Safari instead. (Th
Read the rest
is would be good in a healthy ecosystem, but would only serve to further entrench Google's position in the current situation.) By the way, using a filtering/rewriting proxy has other merits, especially on said older hardware; you can rewrite the entire web page to make it more lightweight and accessible. Check out miniwebproxy[1] and medium-rare[2]. It's also quite simple to write one; you need maybe a hundred lines of Go to start getting results. I've been experimenting with integrating Readability[3][4]; and I think there's more potential to this approach. [1]: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/miniwebproxy [2]: https://humungus.tedunangst.com/r/medium-rare [3]: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability [4]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
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