Browser plugin summarizes webpages for faster reading

Chrome browser extension TLDR — Too Long; Didn't Read — summarizes online content into the reader’s preferred article length.

We recently saw a speed-listening app help users get through podcasts and audio-books faster, which adds to the speed-reading technology that helps readers wolf down information on the internet. Now TLDR is a browser plugin that wants to summarize long articles so users can be even more productive. An acronym for a phrase often used by readers of popular news sites — Too Long; Didn’t Read — the plugin creates synopses of web pages into four trimmed lengths.

Readers can choose from summary, short, medium and long lengths of articles and can configure the app with other personalized settings, such as when to show images. Run by Stremor’s proprietary software Liquid Helium, summaries are created in seconds and are available in a number of languages. The TLDR plugin can be used with web-based applications, such as intranets and email, as well as with news articles.

First launched in 2013, the plugin is still available in the Google Chrome store, but recent reviews have expressed that it may not be functioning as before. Is this something for the coders out there to recreate?