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What Is Bionic Reading? Came across this technique and thought I would give it a go as me eyesight is not as good as it once was. The article recommends " Bionic Reading " for Chrome but gives no suggestion for FireFox. However I did find " Bionic Reader " which although offered by a different developer seems to be an exact copy of 'Bionic Reading'. Bionic Reading for Chrome Bionic Reader for FireFox I gave 'Bionic Reader' a try out on FireFox but found that there were too many customisation options for me. I did try fiddling around with the settings and could see how useful it may be if you were up to spending time customising it to fit yourself. Putting me off keeping it installed was the fact that I could find no way to place a icon on the toolbar. Poking around the FireFox add-on site I found " Smart Reader " which as far as I can see does not have any customisation settings. It does almost have the same fault as ' Bionic Reading ', there is an icon for the tool bar but when the tool is turned off you can hardly see it, turned on and you can see the icon. ' Smart Reader ' only highlights the first letter of every word apart from words with two or less letters. Smart Reader for FireFox Smart Reader for Chrome I found that 'Smart Reader' does seem to make reading somewhat easier. FireFox has an inbuilt reader view accessed through (Ctrl+Alt+R) which I find very useful along with the zoom controls using either or both of those makes reading web pages much more pleasant and easier on the eye. A combination of 'reader view' and 'Smart Reader' is very acceptable for me. You have to start 'Smart Reader' before starting 'reader view' for it to work. One thing to take note of. When using 'Smart Reader' or 'Bionic Reading' in Chrome or Fire Fox the tool has the ability to record every web page and all the information you use on web pages. Like passwords and usernames etc. Both developers state that they do not collect any information or sell it or pass it on to third parties. So it may be best to just use the tool with caution. For instance I only switch them on when I have found a long article to read and switch it of again when finished reading.

The search for the Goldilocks browser and why Firefox might be “just right” for you Multi-process Firefox is fast like other browsers, but won’t suck up memory and slow down your computer as Chrome will sometimes do.

So, I haven't been able to use Google Chrome or Chromium for about 6 or so weeks in my Slackware 14.1 installation on my main system. This all started when Google Chrome and Chromium both went from the last 52.xx version to the newer 53.xx version. I use the SlackBuild script provided by Pat V. in the Slackware repos/extras directory to build a compatible .txz installer for my Slackware using a .deb Google Chrome download. I use Alien Bob's (Eric Hameleers) already built .txz from his repos for Chromium. In both cases, building/installing goes fine. The problem is that when the apps are started, they stay running for about 5-10 seconds and then crash giving me a "segmentation fault" in the command line. Somewhere between the 52.xx and 53.xx some coding changes were made that just do not like my 14.1 installation. I know it's a glibc or lib issue of some sort, but I'll be dashed if I can track it down. I figured I've spent enough time on this so far; I'll just install the newer versions of these browsers when I install Slackware 14.2 one of these days. I've been using Firefox for about a month now. I have it set up just the way my Chrome/Chromiums were set up. The only problem is that Firefox just does not render webpages as quickly as Chrome/Chromium; plus, FF has some herky-jerky scrolling issues. Myeh... oh, well. I've reinstalled the older 52.xx versions of Chrome/Chromium. I'm just going to set Google Chrome as my default browser and leave it like that for a while. Here's a screenie with them all dressed in their fall colors.