I’ve been using the same firefox configuration for years, literally carrying settings with me between whole operating systems and through major revisions of firefox. In all this time, I have only six exceptions in my popup blocker configuration. Two of them are for google. In all this time, I’ve never had any issues with popups from google.

So, like I said, I agree with your principal and it should have its own domain, it’s just my experience that google can be trusted in that area.

Besides, if it causes problems later, you can always remove the exception…

Why do you worry more about Yahoo! than Google? Yahoo! has a similar “no popup” rule. It’s pretty amusing how much people trust Google because…they’re Google.

I wouldn’t say Reader is miles ahead. There’s still the issue that at times it tries to melt down my laptop by resource hogging. I’d say it has a slim lead over Bloglines and both have a rather wide margin over the rest of the online readers I’ve tried out.

As for search, I really don’t care about searching my aggregator. I’m more interested in useful search feeds. I used Google’s search feed functionality a while back. It was really quite awful. I’ve since unsubscribed from all of my Google search feeds. Technorati, Ice Rocket and the others are really no better. When it comes down to it, every 12-24 hours all of the feeds start spewing the same links I saw the last time they refreshed.

Also if you don’t want to lose your place, just open ‘Manage Subscriptions’ in a new tab/window. The only problem is you have to read the rest of the unread posts.

To be fair to Reader, we can think of problems with it, but if you compare it to the next best it’s miles ahead. When they add search capabilities, it’ll be difficult to argue for any of the other current competitors.

Well worth a look.

Clicking on the feed title takes me away from the “all” view. That means when I come back to the “all” view, I’ve lost my place. I have to start reading all of my feed items again. Who knows, maybe the next item looked really interesting. By now, however, it may be burried several items down since the “all” page has re-rendered the list of feed items. Why not add the menu next to the feed title in the “all” view? Save me a click.
As for popups, what I want to do is allow popups for Google Reader. But what I end up doing is allowing popups for Google Reader as well as the rest of Google. If Google ever changes their no pop-up policy, I’ll just start getting popups since a change in your policy doesn’t mean a change in my browser setting. It’s simply a matter of Google taking advantage of my trust in one application by extending it to others. I’m sure Google would never do anything evil. I’m not really concerned about popups from Google. It’s just the principle of the matter.

Anyway, thanks for a fairly enjoyable feed reader. I hope to one day use a Yahoo! reader that puts Google Reader to shame (or at least gives it a run for the money).
Ryan

I’m glad you’re giving Reader a shot. Your issues are generally legitimate, and they’ll be added to our list of feedback. Here’s a few comments/workarounds:

To unsubscribe more easily, you can just click on the feed title in the item. When viewing only items from a feed, the “Feed settings…” menu has an unsubscribe command.

I’m not sure I understand the reticence to allow pop-ups on google.com. This is only necessary because Firefox does not consider a key press a valid trigger for a new window being open. However, we generally have a no pop-up policy (http://www.google.com/help/nopopupads.html) so you’re hopefully not opening the door to a flood of ads.

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

I believe that Yahoo! don’t want to promote RSS technology against they announce last year.
Why ? See bellow:
- No feeds into Yahoo! Video, Yahoo! Actualités (France), Yahoo! Photos, etc.
- Lot of failures or bad coding* into actual feed (Flickr, 360, Shoposphere, groups, etc).
- Not usefull tool or features to read or subscribe to feed (Yahoo! Mail Beta and My Yahoo!)

(*) I created mYLastRSS php class with some features which help to fix these problems. Published on SourceForge.

I’m Yahoo!maniac, and I must use Google Reader against my feeling :o((