Reader view is a good start but it needs to be extended. As a user I want to be able to turn it on universally and opt out for certain sites, or at least make it the default on some sites.

When I rebuilt my blog (http://flukus.github.io/) I tried to build it with reader mode in mind but it's hard, there are some hidden heuristics to trigger it's availability, you need a paragraph with at least 67 characters or something like that. So the articles work in reader mode, but the index doesn't. It doesn't work at all on file:// paths, so not great for proof reading.

As a developer I'd love to be able to put a meta tag in the page to always turn it on. There are a million other ways they could improve it too. I hope this is the future of the web.

So it does! Trying it now, don't yet know how comprehensive it is, but it seems to work well on a Medium post, at least. Thanks!

Now, how to increase awareness of that feature?

There was a campaign when it was new feature that showed a popup hilighting the feature after update, like this:

http://winaero.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Firefox-3...

Considering that reader view has it's own dedicated button and all, I'm not sure how it possibly could be made more promenient without being annoying. The popup already was bit on the edge of being annoying.