How I Built a Chrome Extension to Improve Reading on Medium
I read a lot of articles on Medium. Mostly technical stuff, product stories, startup ideas, and random things I find while browsing. But there were a few things about the experience that kept annoying me. One was finding an article I actually wanted to read, opening it, and then realizing it was behind a member-only restriction. If I wanted to see whether there was another publicly available…
For years, the author of this article has been an avid reader of articles on Medium, often delving into technical pieces, startup ideas, and random discoveries. However, certain aspects of the reading experience on Medium continually irked them. Two significant issues stood out: the inability to access articles without a membership and the lack thereof for a native Dark Mode.
The author found it cumbersome to manually search for publicly available versions of member-only articles. They also found the white screen during nighttime reading on Medium to be jarring, despite the availability of Dark Mode in their editor, browser, and other apps. Lastly, saving articles for later use was often a separate process, adding to the inconvenience.
These minor frustrations, individually, were not significant. Yet, collectively, they began to feel like a broken experience. The author contemplated building a tool to address these issues and decided against creating a separate service. Instead, they aimed to integrate the solution within the existing browsing experience, allowing the extension to operate smoothly in the background while reading Medium articles.
Dark Mode was another personal frustration addressed by the extension. The author appreciated Dark Mode in their editor, browser, and other apps but found Medium to still lack a proper native option. By adding this feature, they believed they provided a simple solution to a common pain point.
Saving articles for later reference was another issue tackled by the extension. The author often came across useful content that they wished to revisit, but this typically required additional tools or steps. By integrating PDF export into the extension, the author aimed to streamline the process, avoiding the need to seek out other tools.
Through this journey, the author discovered that small annoyances, when combined, can create a broken experience. Rather than solving each issue individually with separate tools, they sought to merge them into one cohesive browser extension. The goal was to minimize friction and maintain the natural browsing experience on Medium.
The resulting extension, Medium Paywall Remover, focuses on improving the overall reading experience rather than addressing a single problem. The author invites readers to explore the project further and encourages them to share their own frustrations with the reading experience on Medium.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
