Did you know that many news sites publish text-only versions of their content? These include:

• CNN
• The Christian Science Monitor
• NPR
• CBC
• The Daily Mail

What’s great about using them is you avoid the auto-playing video, image carousels, comment sections, and other clutter that not only make the article difficult to read- it makes the page load time go through the roof! Knowing these text-only, or “lite”, versions exist is great, but I get sent a lot of articles via social media and messages. Remembering how to convert the URL for many of these sites is a hassle.

I wrote an open-source and free browser extension called LiteNews! It automatically will redirect you to the lite version of articles for the above news outlets when you click a link. It’s available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. It’s the first time I’ve written a cross-platform browser extension, and I can thank the Plasmo Framework for making it easy. I wrote my extension once and published in stores for all three browsers without needing to change a line of code!

The code can be found here on my GitHub. Click here to find download links for your favorite browser!