Two screenfulls of a web page, one monitor?

December 10, 2012 1:55 PM

Is there any way to make a web browser use two windows to show the first and second window-fulls of a single web page? This would be the equivalent of the "two up" view found in some PDF viewers. On the left, your normal view of a web page. On the right, the next part of that same page -- the thing you would see if you hit "page down" in the first window.

Two years ago, another MeFite asked this question, and didn't find a satisfactory answer.

The model use case is reading a long web article on a 30" screen. It would be great to be able to take in the first couple of screens worth of text at one glance. Thus, it would be important that the right hand window show the next window-full of content automatically -- loading the top of the same page in a second window, so that both left and right windows show the same content, would not do the trick.

Thanks for your help!

posted by dgrobinson to technology (6 answers total)

It would be possible to write an extension to do this, but I do not know of an existing one.

Presumably hitting "page down" (or the spacebar) would cause both windows to scroll don by two pages?
posted by tylerkaraszewski at 1:59 PM on December 10, 2012

I don't know of a browser or plugin that does this specifically, but I think you could maybe do it with a couple of iframes and some JavaScript to link up the scrolling. I just wrote a little bit of code to synch scrolling between two different views of the same document (source on the left, preview of rendered source on the right, basically). If you can control scrolling for an iframe the way you can a div with overflowed content, it seems do-able.

It might be kinda clunky.
posted by brennen at 3:44 PM on December 10, 2012

If you had 2 physical monitors you could extend the browser across the two. Looks like this would make a single monitor act like it is two or more.
posted by Sophont at 3:53 PM on December 10, 2012

Since you just want to read articles, I think the simple (though not very elegant) way to do this is to just render the web page to PDF and use a PDF viewer.

You can probably find some way of scripting it such that you have a button on a toolbar that automatically prints the current page to PDF and opens the resulting temporary file in the PDF viewer of your choice.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 10:55 PM on December 10, 2012

Two windows sounds complicated. Would these hacks suit?

If there is the option, click on "print" and it often loads up an article on one single page.
or
Check out the Autopager add-on for Firefox. It loads the next page automatically below the previous one. Might work for you.
posted by guy72277 at 11:54 PM on December 10, 2012

It seems like the Column Reader add-on for Firefox will do what you want. Looks like it has options for more than two columns as well.
posted by czytm at 2:52 PM on December 11, 2012