I got this in an email from a reader today, and love it too much not to share.

iReader is an extension for Firefox and Google Chrome that takes articles, and makes them easier to read. There are a million different ways to do that, from Readability to Instapaper to who knows what else, but iReader actually does it better than any of the others. It’s not for saving things for later, or for bookmarking, or anything like that – it just makes articles easier to navigate, read, and share.

What iReader does so well is handle the annoyances of the Web. Lots of sites break things into multiple pages, or make you hop from image to image, just to get the entire article – the more you click, the more ads you see, the more money they make. Good for the site, annoying for the reader. iReader is smart enough to see all that, and plan accordingly. Once it’s installed, a single click or keyboard shortcut takes a multi-page article (like, say, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest at the New Yorker), pulls out the text, and condenses it all into a single, scrollable, nice looking page.

iReader lets you control the font size, gives you a one-click way to share the article via email, Twitter or Facebook, and even lets you print the article minus all the other junk on the page. You can copy and paste text, and if you save from that page to Instapaper or Read it Later, those services will grab all the text and none of the clutter.

It’s a super-simple application, designed to run in the background until you find an article you don’t feel like clicking a million times to read – it doesn’t even show up in the address bar unless the page you’re on is an article. Once you need it, it’s immediately indispensable.

(Thanks, Miguel!)