# Mozilla Readability

10 Hacker News commenters recommended Mozilla Readability and 1 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 6 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Free open-source library that strips clutter from web pages to leave the article text, and is built into some browsers. Caveat: it does not always work on paywalled pages.

## Why people recommend it

- Common step before rendering or extraction (4 comments): "pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48854559)) "A more pragmatic approach would be to run the content through something like readability" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46598162)) "Piping through readability before rendering is what made mine usable" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49878657))
- Quick one-click cleanup in browsers (2 comments): "Readability builtins on Firefox and Safari (mac) clean it up." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47699706)) "the Readability extension sorted it in a single click for me" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49843659))

## What people warn about

- Does not always work on paywalled pages (1 comments): "It does not always work, especially if the page is paywalled but it works for most sites." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47481504))
- Far from ideal (1 comments): "Readability is far from ideal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48856095))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Tesseract OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/tesseract.md): 32 recommend
- [Docling](https://hackerapproved.com/p/docling.md): 19 recommend
- [Zpdf](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zpdf.md): 8 recommend
- [MarkItDown by Microsoft](https://hackerapproved.com/p/markitdown.md): 7 recommend
- [Azure Document Intelligence](https://hackerapproved.com/p/azure-document-intelligence.md): 5 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Mozilla Readability", https://hackerapproved.com/p/mozilla-readability/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).