October 24 2026
The Safari web browser has a longstanding annoying misfeature: it announces “Reader Available” and “Translation Available” in the address bar, whether you like it or not, with no way I know of to stop that madness. This behavior is bad on Mac, worse on iPhone. Below is a screen recording of Safari on Mac.
If you watch the screen recording frame by frame, you can see that the page URL appears for a fraction of a second after the link is clicked, but then the URL is replaced by “Reader Available” and “Translation Available” for an incredible five seconds before the URL is clearly distinguishable!
This annoying Safari behavior is worse on iPhone because its toolbar is much narrower, with room for fewer controls, and Safari assumes wrongly that when “Reader Available” or “Translation Available” is displayed, you want the main toolbar widget to trigger reader or translation rather than open the menu of options.
On iPhone, you can’t open a Safari extension popup window from the start page, as you can see in the screen recording below. (Fortunately, iPad does have a separate extensions widget.) Thus, you need to open a web page first. But then you need to wait until after “Reader Available” and “Translation Available” too, otherwise Safari will trigger them instead of showing your list of Safari extensions.
In the screen recording, I reload the web page a few times to show the sequence of events, pressing the toolbar button later and later on each trial, with different results.
For some reason, you can edit the Page Menu that appears when you press the… dot dot dot button, but you can’t edit the menu that appears when you press the main widget on the left side of the Safari toolbar, so you also need to scroll down to the bottom of the menu to get to your Safari extensions.
The irony is that Safari on both iPhone and Mac already has a shortcut to trigger reader mode without opening the menu: press and hold the toolbar widget. Thus, we don’t need Safari to trigger reader with a mere press, without holding, when “Reader Available” is displayed. That’s annoying, inconvenient, and inconsistent.
The ease of use of iPhone is legendary. In my experience, this means based on myth. In so many ways, I find iPhone to be a frustrating device. Of course its small size presents physical limitations, but poorly designed software isn’t helping the situation.
Addendum
After I published this blog post, Nick Heer highlighted another annoyance shown by my Mac screen recording: the translate button maddeningly moves from the left to the right side of the address bar! But the translate button on the left side doesn’t actually work, so you have to wait for the transition to finish. Bizarre.