> A plain HTML page with no CSS is a near-perfect reading experience. The problem is that almost nobody ships that, because the web also became a publishing platform where authors compete for attention.

They don't ship it because of greed. They only want your attention because of greed. They only infest their website with ads because of greed.

> The browser is a delivery mechanism,

http is a delivery mechanism. The browser is a user agent. It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user. If your browser isn't doing that for you it's time to find a new browser or beat the one you have into submission until it behaves. "reader mode" is a useful compromise.

> It's supposed to display content according to the preferences of the user.

That's right, the original idea was exactly about that, but like I said - in practice that is no longer a thing.

Using the editor for reading any content is enormously underrated. Check this out - this entire thread opens in my editor as an outline with nested structure. Meaning that all the regular outline operations are available to me - folding, imenu (interactive TOC), narrowing, quick search, contextual search, pattern-based search, sparse-tree search.

Extracting all the URLs on the page while ignoring HN-internal ones is a single keypress for me - there's a link to a YT video - I can watch it, controlling the playback directly from my editor, I can extract transcript and summarize it with an LLM request - all without opening new tabs, without switching focus.

I can narrow on the sub-thread, or select a region and export only that part to a pdf. The possibilities are virtually unlimited.