I never set out to build a browser extension. I was just tired, annoyed and frustrated of terrible reading experiences online. You click a link from a local news site or a blog and suddenly your screen is full of ads, pop-ups and autoplay videos. And all you wanted to do was read the article.

So I decided to fix it. Not for everyone, at first, just for me. That’s how CleanReader started.

I’d been playing around with agentic coding, building small tools and testing how far I could take them. This one felt like the right kind of itch to scratch. It was simple. It was personal and I needed it.

CleanReader is a Chrome extension that strips out all the noise from news articles and gives you a clean, readable version in one click. It uses Mozilla’s Readability.js to grab just the important stuff like the article text, any hero images and the formatting that matters.

Everything happens locally. There’s no dodgy tracking or nasty data collection. Nothing gets sent anywhere. You click the button and your article becomes what it should have been all along — readable.

I wanted it to feel like a real reading experience. A clear page with good typography, an easy toggle between light and dark mode and no distractions. Just beautiful content.

This isn’t a big fancy startup idea, it’s a small fix to a big annoyance. And that’s what makes it work.

The cool thing is, it works across thousands of sites. From your local news sites to the larger ones and from tiny blogs to university articles. If it’s an article, CleanReader will clean it up.

I’ve used it every day since building it. And now it’s out there for anyone who needs the same thing.

If you read a lot online and you’re fed up with the clutter, give it a go.

Try CleanReader

Let me know what you think. I’m still building and iterating.