Reading long-form articles on the web is uniformly awful, but why? Though multitasking, distractions, and harsh screen light all detract from the experience, developer Richard Wallis sees another culprit: scrolling. “Moving text, even if it’s under your control,” he says, “will break your reading rhythm.” Some apps work with pagination, but even that involves breaking the flow of text. So how do you fix it? According to Wallis, by moving the scrolling to the top. When you reach the bottom of the page on MagicScroll, text starts appearing at the top of the page, so all you have to do is look up.
MagicScroll bookmarklet reinvents scrolling on the web for distraction-free reading
is a senior tech and policy editor focused on online platforms and free expression. Adi has covered virtual and augmented reality, the history of computing, and more for The Verge since 2011.
MagicScroll isn’t a new idea — Wallis has been running an e-reading app with the technique for some time. But he’s also launched a Chrome extension and cross-browser bookmarklet that’ll do the same thing for web pages. We gave it a try, and it’s genuinely fantastic: being able to read without dealing with either finding your place after a scroll or jumping between pages makes concentrating easy, and there’s even a percentage marker that tells you how far you’ve gotten through the article. It’s a little hard to describe, so head over here for a demo and the bookmarklet.
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