Lifehacker just released a new version of their Better GReader Firefox extension. It brings all of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Google Reader under one roof, and by installing the extension you can enable up to 8 of scripts that will all enhance either the look or usability of Google Reader.
One script in particular that they included really caught my eye. It’s called Google Reader Preview Enhanced, and what it does is give you the option to open a particular feed item’s website within a frame in Google Reader. This becomes the default behavior when you click on the title of the article, or on a specialized button located at the bottom of each feed item:
This is ideal for sites that don’t provide the full article content within the feeds, but one of the real reasons that I’ve found this especially useful for is commenting. The script removes the burden of having to open a new tab/window to leave a comment on a site. Heck, I have enough tabs open already and don’t need to add to them.
Clicking on the title or preview button a second time will switch back to the actual feed item, or if you still want to open the site in a new tab/window just click the little arrow at the far right side of feed item bar (located next to the time).
This reminds me of what Netvibes has with switching from feed view to website view. If I used Google Reader, this would be one of my favorite scripts. *bookmarks for future potential use*
Yeah, thats one thing I miss about using Netvibes, but the fact that it only saves what you’ve read instead of the entire feed got to me. This script would be handy except that Google Reader crashes Firefox 3 Beta 2, so I use Prism and that doesn’t have extensions.
I wonder how much memory FF will suck up after using the preview feature.
Darn this is so useful. Must have.
Google Reader doesn’t crash the nightly builds of Firefox 3, so the issue must have gotten fixed. Or maybe there is a compatibility issue with another extension?
It’s no different than opening the site in a new tab. The script doesn’t prefetch any of the sites, so it’s not like the browser is loading hundreds of pages at the same time.