For some time now, I’ve been wanting a Firefox UI button for Gabriel Coarna’s extremely useful Readable Bookmarklet/Script which makes the web “reading-friendly” by cutting out all the flashy ads and colors.

Only, I don’t like bookmarklets,  they take up too much space. Fortunately you can use existing Firefox extensions to turn this bookmarklet into a Firefox UI button.

THE SIMPLE WAY WITH A DEFAULT STYLE

Install the CustomButtons extension.

Then click here to install the button. Click OK and this is will setup my style for the button. Skip to points 3 and 4 in the Custom Way below.

THE CUSTOM WAY

If you want to put in a custom style, go to Readabale’s setup page and customize your style.

1. Right click the Readable Bookmarklet and select “Copy Link Location”.

2. Then click here and select EDIT. Go to the “Code” tab and paste the copied text into quotes after loadURI(“ ”). Hit OK.

3. Right Click anywhere on the toolbars and select “Customize”. You should see the Readable button.

4. Drag where you want and enjoy.

                          

Ubiquity is an “intelligent” command-line and natural language parser for Firefox. Its hard to explain because of its ubiquitous features( everything from Twitter posts to Maps and email), so I’ll leave that to the excellent screencast on their site.

I thought it would be cool to have a Ubiquity command that uses the Readability project and fixes your web-based reading material. Turns out, its easy to have it, and the results are very satisfactory to me.

The screenshot shows how a cumbersome page can be viewed cleanly using Ubiquity.

Ubiquity can be downloaded from Mozilla Labs . Once Ubiquity is installed , Ctrl+Space (be default) opens the Ubiquity panel.

For an easier method to start using the Readability command , just visit this page , and in the bar where Firefox tells you it has found Ubiquity commands, click “Subscribe”.

You can manually add the command to Ubiquity as well. To install custom commands such as this one : type command-editor in Ubiquity, which will take you to your custom command editor page.