Google Reader is a web application that I use everyday to read my RSS feeds. I like to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate around the feeds instead of using a mouse - when you have a long river flow of RSS feed items, pressing a key is easier than scrolling on the mouse continuously.
On Google Reader, you can press character “v” to open the feed item link. By default, if it’s opened in a new tab, it will change the focus to the newly opened tab. I found that annoying because usually, I prefer to open all new links while going through the feed and then go through the opened links as a bunch.
I looked around on the net and found a partial solution on Lifehacker that suggested to change the tab opening setting to force it opening in background through “about:config”. But this changes the behaviour of tab opening globally inside Firefox, e.g. if an external program like Thunderbird open a new tab for a new link in Firefox, it will be loaded in background.
So I created a Greasemonkey script so that when you press ‘v’ in Google Reader, the link will be opened in background. To install it:
- Install Greasemonkey addon
- Restart Firefox
- Click here to install the script.
If you have any feedback, just leave a comment here.
November 7th, 2007 at 2:56 am
You should change the Include filter to “http*://www.google.com/reader/view/*”. This supports https (I use https for all google apps) and allows for the crud that google sometimes appends to the end of the reader URL. It worked great once I made that change. Thanks!!
November 11th, 2007 at 11:05 am
Hi Chris, thanks for the suggestion! I have made the change to my file as a result.
February 19th, 2008 at 7:20 am
Hi Sunny,
How about changing line 15 to
if( event.which==118 && !event.ctrlKey ) {
This way it would be possible to use ctrl-v to paste a URL to the Add subscription box instead of just getting a tab opened in the background.
July 6th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
That’s saved the life! Thanks very much!