Firefox Reader View is a really neat way to consume content on the web — on compatible websites, it extracts the title, author, and main content from the site, and only displays that — leaving out those annoying ads and just about everything else.

Unfortunately, Firefox Reader View doesn’t have good (any?) developer docs, so finding answers to common issues just wasn’t happening for me.  Usually Stack Overflow has the answer — and I did find this helpful answer that explains how Firefox Reader View works, but it didn’t really fix my issue.

The Problem: Incorrect Authors

The Solution: Include an Author Meta tag on your page that looks like this:

<meta name="author" content="John Doe">

For example ^

If you’re using WordPress, you can generate this dynamically as part of your theme code.  It might look something like this:

if ( is_single() ) : ?>
     <meta name="author" content="<?php the_author(); ?>">
<?php endif;

If you’re using the popular CoAuthors Plus plugin for managing multiple authors, you can use the coauthors template function for outputting the author names.

Hope this helps!  This optimization may also help with SEO.  By the way, it looks like when there is no author meta tag, the Firefox Reader View javascript parses the content and looks for an html element with an ‘authors’ class — which in my case, was the direct cause of the incorrect authors showing.

Got any comments on Firefox Reader View or the Author meta tag?  Chime in below.