fragility

Over the past few days I’ve been experiencing a really annoying bug on Google Reader. I’m not sure if it’s actually related to Firefox or Google Reader, but I’ve tried in Opera and it’s not happening, at least not on the same way.

Suppose I’m reading my feeds and I want to open some item. I can press the ‘v’ hotkey and everything is fine. But sometimes, when I have the mouse connected to the laptop I reach for the third button and click on the item title. I usually don’t go to that new window right away (I have this habit of opening lots of stuff and just wait for it to load and read it only after I finish all the feed items). The thing is, after I middle click the title, when I press ‘j’ again to go to the next feed item, Firefox’s “quick find” feature kicks in, so I’m just taken to the next ‘j’ character, which is extremely annoying. If I want the feed items section to regain focus, I have to left click on some item again.

I tried this on Opera, and it doesn’t happen, but after I middle click a title I have to move the mouse out of the link area, otherwise ‘j’ won’t do anything.

While trying this on other browsers I also found out that Google Reader’s keyboard shortcuts are not supported on Konqueror.

The weird thing is that I believe this only started happening after the last time Google Reader told me there was an update and that I should refresh. So, is this happening to someone else ?

Update
Looks like this was already noticed on the discussion group.

Update 2
The Reader team has replied to that thread from before saying they are working on a fix. Way to go guys !

Update 3
It’s fixed !

Couldn’t agree more.

Besides, why do Google sharing pages (Reader’s and now this new one) always have such long and complicated URL’s ? Wouldn’t it be easier to have a personalized URL like…Bloglines ? del.icio.us ? Almost everything else ?

I find it amazing how they can come up with such great stuff and just ignore simple things like these.

Gears is beta indeed. Usually, most of the “beta” stuff that comes out of Google is relatively stable, and most people trust it really easily, but be careful with Gears in this early phase.

As I’ve mentioned yesterday, I decided to try Google Reader again. I had also installed Google Gears some days ago, when it appeared. I haven’t really been using the offline feature on Reader, but last night something happened: I couldn’t see anything on the Reader page except for the logo, and the top right link bar. I thought “hey, this is beta after all” and I went to sleep.

This morning I tried Konqueror. It worked. I asked other people who were also using Firefox. It worked for them. And then I noticed: Firebug gave me a JavaScript error. I tried disabling Firebug, same thing. I banged my head against the head for a while until it hit me: Gears ! It had to be Gears. And it was Gears.

Not that I’m pissed by it. I don’t use Gears anyway, just installed it for the curiosity. And yes, I know, both products are beta and I shouldn’t be complaining. I’m not. I’m just warning other potential users of this combination.

By the way, I’m loving Google Reader. One huge advantage I’m noticing over Bloglines: no repeated items. Bloglines has a nasty habit of showing you old items as new, even when they have not been updated.

Reader has really come a long way since I first tried it. Not that I’m a Google fanboy (I’m probably starting to act like one sometimes) but I was expecting a lot more when it first showed up. I guess it just needed some time to mature.

Update: Nice to see the guys at Google are paying attention.

I decided to give another try to Google Reader. I use Bloglines, but lately I’ve heard so much about Google Reader and how much it improved that I just let myself get taken by the hype.

One thing i really like: on Bloglines, when you are viewing a folder (therefore viewing more than one feed on the same list) different feeds get separated by a title with the name and description of the feed. If you use keyboard shortcuts to go through feeds, most of the times you can’t even see those separators because it just scrolls down to the next item, and once in a while you get lost and have to scroll up a bit to so you know what you’re reading. On Google Reader you get a “from Feed Name” on each item, and the item you’re currently reading is highlighted.

The fact that things like embedded Youtube videos appear on the reader is really nice. Saves you a click and reloading that same content (and some more from the rest of the page layout).

The way tags are used in Google Reader is somehow confusing. Because tags and folders are the same thing. Therefore, it’s confusing if you have a feed on more than one folder.

So I’ll just try it for some days, weigh the pros and cons compared to Bloglines, and maybe I’ll report back on this with some more thoughts.