The Web pages people share in Twitter can look annoyingly bland and alike in Twitter’s iOS app. If so, it’s not your fault. But turning off the default setting you may have been opted into is your problem.
The issue here seems to be Twitter’s test, as reported by the Guardian in October, in having Twitter open links in Safari’s simplified if not style-starved Reader View. Sometimes, that’s great: The core content of a page snaps into view almost instantly, without the ads that wriggle into view and the junk links that pad out the page.
But in the weeks since I’ve seen this behavior return after I thought I’d opted out of it earlier, I’ve more often wished I could see the page without Apple’s abstraction. When Reader View isn’t making pages look identical, with the same boring fonts, it hides some of their content–Techmeme’s leaderboard lists, for instance, don’t even appear in Reader View.
And if you want advertising-supported sites you like to make a little money off your attention, Reader View is not your friend or theirs: Most ads don’t appear in this perspective.
I’m supposed to disable Reader View for a page by tapping the black rectangle at the left of Safari’s address bar, but too often, that only leads to the page reloading in Reader View seconds later.
You can stop this obnoxiousness, but it’s nowhere obvious. Open Twitter’s app, tap the silhouette icon at the bottom right to bring up your profile, tap the gear icon near the top right, and select “Settings and privacy.” See the heading for “Display and sound,” where you might expect to see a setting governing how pages appear? Ignore it and instead tap “Accessibility.”
Now scroll down–never mind that the disappearing scroll bars in iOS might suggest there’s nothing more to fuss with there. You should now see a slider control labeled “Open links in Reader View”; tap that to end this behavior.
Unless you can’t. After I tweeted out a version of this advice, a reader replied that he didn’t see any such option in his own copy of the app. Maybe his running a beta version of iOS 11 explains that? Or maybe he’s been opted into a more diabolical version of whatever test I got sucked into? I can’t tell you for sure, since Twitter PR has not yet answered the query I sent in Thursday morning. If you have relevant testimony, I welcome it in the comments.
Does this work in all versions of the IOS?
Thank you!