Firefox already has a so-called "reader view", which basically strips away the distractions. It would be nice to see this implemented more thoroughly, so navigation menus are retained and become standardized/clutter-free.

And it gets around some adblock blocks :)

Yeah, I think we need better collaborative filtering and/or ML for ad-blocking. And the browser should always make the website believe that the ads are shown (no altering of the DOM, but instead alter a copy of the DOM).

Yes, but one advantage of blocking ads is not having to get the content. On a slow uplink, such as Tor, that's a major issue.

True. I guess you could load the content from a client running at a central service, and send the stripped-down version to the final client. Of course, you'd have to trust the service.