Hacker News Reader

Comment by ambirex | Hacker News Reader

One early criticism (aside from the sharing bugaboo) is the header is larger making the allowable reading area much smaller.

the topmost the feed content can be read is ~193px from the top of the browser. And you can't scroll down because of the way the page it built.

  Here is what firebug told me:
  29px - account bar
  59px - search bar
  73px - feed toolbar
  32px - feed title bar (in the reading pane)

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More bars than Dublin...I agree, the waste of space is annoying. I can't even think of the last time I wanted to search my RSS feeds and it's taking up a chunk of space.

On a 13inch Macbook add the Mac App bar, Chrome (tabs + search-url + bookmarks toolbar) a third of the readable area is covered with "bars".

Yep, with GNOME3 and Firefox, the new Google Reader takes some 326 of my 768 vertical pixels before we get to the actual article I'm reading

same setup, i used the minimalist reader plugin to make life easier: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pgpppbiipcfcldpgcj...

NOTE: I haven't checked to see if this plugin still works on the new google reader design.

Thankyou! It does appear to work.

I am very annoyed at the waste of space, waiting for a new Google Reader Absolutely Compact extension for Opera. That said, I frequently search my RSS feeds.

To my surprise, there's often lots of very informing stuff on economic/political questions I might search about; it's like consulting my own private network of expert commentary, and is often more useful to me than google search.

For real. It's even worse in Google groups. I realized this a few months ago during the Chromebook beta test; Everything is a toolbar, and Chrome is giving me UI fatigue.

My biggest complaint is they tampered with the scroll bar. It's way too small now and only functions as an aesthetic touch... The regular scroll bar works perfectly fine.

One of the greatest parts about Reader is that you don't need a mouse at all. Try using the keyboard shortcuts. (Hit Shift-? for a helpful overview)

I'm strangely addicted to my mouse. Must be all the years of gaming. The range of movement is minuscule compared to using the keyboard.

That was my exact reaction -- barely usable on my 1280x800 screen. Until there's a better user style out there, this css makes the theme much better for me, by hiding the search bar and the feed toolbar:

    #top-bar { display: none; }
    #viewer-header { display: none; }

press the f key.

I'm impressed by how clean this functionality is. Definitely less annoyed by the waste of space now!

The problem with that mode is that the content area becomes way too wide. With a 1024-1280 px wide browser window, the sidebar makes the content area an acceptable width for comfortable reading.

I was going to say the same thing. I took a screenshot and looked at the space. The actual content uses about 80% of the width and 70% of the height of my screen. Ideally, they could've moved a lot of stuff to the sidebar to avoid the four bars you also mention.

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