Reading Ruler

Name: Reading Ruler
Rating: 4.8519 (27 reviews)
Author: Oren Trutner

Highlights the line of text you are reading.

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Reading Ruler is a Chrome extension designed to enhance your reading experience by highlighting the line of text directly under your mouse cursor. This feature helps you stay focused on the content you're reading and easily return to it if your mind wanders. Ideal for articles, blogs, and longer posts, Reading Ruler allows you to customize the highlight color and opacity to suit your preferred contrast level.

You can toggle the ruler on or off with a simple button or use the Alt+R hotkey for quick access. Reading Ruler respects your privacy — it doesn't collect or send any data to the cloud, contains no ads, and is fully open source. Explore the source code on GitHub and enjoy distraction-free reading today.

Add-on Productivity Accessibility Education

By:

Daily users:

Rating:

Version:

1.8 Last updated: 2022-09-11

Version code:

5456687

Creation date:

2020-08-29

Risk:

Permissions:

storage
tabs

Size:

89.58KB

URLs:

Website

Full description:

Source:

Firefox Browser Add-ons

Data ingested on:

2025-07-14

Ranking

# 3,971 ▲ 21

Other rankings

#141 in Bookmarks ▲ 1

#14 in rule keyword 9 ▼ 1

#16 in loading keyword 24

#17 in trading keyword 35

#70 in coding keyword 8 ▼ 1

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User reviews

Reading Ruler is praised for aiding focus and reading comprehension, especially for users with ADHD or visual challenges. It is simple, effective, and easy to use. Common suggestions include adding customization such as adjustable highlight lines, more color options, and improved toggle controls for convenience. Users also desire an opt-in activation to avoid the ruler being active on all pages by default and better support for highlighting multiple lines or paragraphs. Overall, it's a valuable tool with room for customizable enhancements.

Pros

Effectively helps users with ADHD or attention difficulties focus on reading text.
Simple, efficient, and does exactly what it promises without unnecessary complexity.
Helps improve reading comprehension and reduces eye strain when reading long texts.
Easy to use with minimal configuration and accessible through the browser's UI.
Supports quick enabling/disabling with some users appreciating the hotkey feature.

Cons

Lack of customization options such as choosing the number of highlighted lines or units at a time.
No universal toggle or shortcut to quickly enable/disable the add-on across all websites.
Default activation on every page can be annoying; users prefer an opt-in or domain-based disable option.
Limited highlight color choices; users want more color options beyond the default set.
Does not support highlighting whole paragraphs or multiple lines easily, limiting flexibility.

Recent reviews

by Fi*****, 2025-05-20

does exactly what it says on the tin, and does it well. i, too, like that one reviewer below, have adhd, and it really helps. i agree that adding the ability to choose units/blocks of TEXT* i can't believe i wrote code for some reason, would be GGGGREAT :D but nevertheless, solid! edit. i want to add that would be nice to have a toggle to choose to always show videos on a page in maximum brightness (i.e. without the dimming) when using white stripe mode edit 2. although you can just disable the addon on pages with videos... yeah you can ignore that last bit lolz

by IN*****, 2025-04-14

by 远离*****, 2025-03-30

View all user reviews ›

Extension safety

Risk impact

Risk impact measures the level of extra permissions an extension has access to. A low risk impact extension cannot do much harms, whereas a high risk impact extension can do a lot of damage like stealing your password, bypassing your security settings, and accessing your personal data. High risk impact extensions are not necessarily malicious. However, if they do turn malicious, they can be very harmful.

Reading Ruler requires some sensitive permissions that could impact your browser and data security. Exercise caution before installing.

Risk impact analysis details

Critical Grants access to browser tabs, which can be used to track user browsing habits and history, presenting a privacy concern.
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Risk likelihood

Risk likelihood measures the probability that a Firefox add-on may turn malicious. This is determined by the publisher and the Firefox add-on reputation on Firefox Browser Add-ons, the amount of time the Firefox add-on has been around, and other signals about the Firefox add-on. Our algorithms are not perfect, and are subject to change as we discover new ways to detect malicious extensions. We recommend that you always exercise caution when installing a Firefox add-on.

Reading Ruler has earned a fairly good reputation and likely can be trusted.

Risk likelihood analysis details

High This extension has low user count. Unpopular extensions may not be stable or safe.
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