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I have a website which looks good if viewed the way I designed it. Every time I visit it from Chrome on Android, I am given a prompt along the bottom of the screen to "Show Simplified View". If I click that prompt to actually see it in simplified view, the site will only display 1 news item (there are supposed to be 25 on a page), it removes all controls (log in, add news item, comments), and scrolling doesn't work anymore. There are multiple other problems as well (headlines/images/article excerpts are not matched together, color scheme is missing, etc.) This happens only on Google Chrome, no other browser I've tested does this.

I don't see the prompt to switch to simplified view on other sites. My preference would be to place a tag on my site to never show this prompt. I have googled around for that, but I have only found articles about how to turn the feature on from Chrome, nothing about how to disable the feature from the server side.

My second thought might be to work with this simplified view and get it functional for people who want to use it. However, I have read that it also blocks all advertising and my site is supported solely by ads, so this is a distant second if I absolutely can't prevent the prompt from appearing.

TO SUM UP:

  1. How can I prevent the "Show simplified view" prompt from appearing or
  2. Failing that, how do I set up my site to work with simplified view?
Johnny Wales
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    Very frustrating to inherit a project with thousands of lines of code (all using pixel measurements) with no clear indication from Google what is triggering the "Show simplified view" nag-bar. Fundamentally, it's none of Google's business to modify the contents of a page, isn't that why we switched to https?! #Google #monopoly #antitrust – PJ Brunet May 20 '19 at 00:49
  • As a Chrome Android user, I like Simplified View because most Web pages out there are written so badly and are so ridden with what ultimately has nothing to do with the user, that switching to Simplified View saves on battery and lets one read some bloody hypertext in peace, free from distractions. It's my user agent, it is "modifying" the page *for me*, to my preference. – Armen Michaeli Oct 22 '21 at 23:33
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    As someone with low vision, I want to tell all web developers -- do whatever you can to fully enable mobile web and feature such as reader mode. I'm able to use reader mode to set a lot of the formatting of a website aside so that I can actually read the text at a size my eyes can actually handle. – halr9000 Sep 04 '22 at 13:58

6 Answers6

6

Replace P tags with div in your page. this mode is also known as Reader mode. Probably this answer might help you.

Mukul Bhardwaj
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  • Out of the two on this page, this is the more appropriate solution, for people who might be using fonts that are definitely big and readable on mobile, but Chrome decides to be whiny and say "nooo make it bigger". The *P* tags make chrome decide that the webpage is structured to be mostly read like a book full of text and therefore adds the 'reader mode' suggestion. – cake Aug 02 '18 at 14:21
3

The answer I found for this was to change the font size based on the media width, and once the font size was big enough to be readable on the mobile device I was using, it stopped suggesting the simplified view. The exact code used was: 

@media (max-width: 540px) {
    body {
        font-size:18px !important;
    }
}

Simple enough.

Johnny Wales
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    I've got my body set to use a font-size of 20px and I still get the prompt, so this did not work for me. – Ahi Tuna Sep 07 '19 at 13:53
2

Also check your viewport settings for mobile devices. I received this popup when I changed the initial scale of the viewport to 0.6.

Basically Google recognised that the font size is too small. Looks good to me but probably not for visitors without perfect eyesight.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=0.6, maximum-scale=2">

In this case, changing initial-scale=1 will fix this

Ryan NZ
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-1

A much better solution I ended up with

p { display: table; }

Just change the paragraphs to any of the generic blocks in my case I made it a table.

Abhishek
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-1

Show Simplified Views prompts when there is more text, Chrome prompts if it thinks it is a paragraph website where user is to read (by detecting texts (more than 700 approx)

If you truncate or remove texts, and make it less. Chrome won't prompt.

Anonymous Girl
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G'day mate. There's a permanent solution. Go into chrome://flags and search 'reader mode' and disable both flags which has 'reader mode' on it's name. And then, it's done, you'll never be annoyed by that pop-up again(unless you will uninstall and reinstall that chrome browser and then. ........ .... you'll have to do it again). Thanks mate,bye.

DJR Harris
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    Well, I was working from the perspective of a web designer rather than an end user, but good to have the end user perspective here too, I suppose. – Johnny Wales Apr 03 '19 at 13:58