Tech and life

Another Google Reader topic today to follow on from my last post. This annoyance has been bugging me for a while and I’ve found a solution to it today.

More and more webmasters and bloggers are using FeedBurner to manage their RSS feeds. FeedBurner has introduced a feature which allows tracking of feed clicks in Google Analytics so as to track visitors from FeedBurner feeds. Problem is that when Google Analytics tracks FeedBurner visitors, it appends the feed item URL with Google Analytics tags, e.g. utm_source=feedburner, utm_medium=feed, etc. I’m sure you’ve all seen this. If you hover over the link to the feed URL in Google Reader before clicking it, it will start something like http://feedproxy.google.com…. Just as an example, here’s what appeared in the browser address bar after I clicked a link in Google Reader to a web page on Techie Buzz:

http://techie-buzz.com/google-chrome/google-chrome-now-supports-greasemonkey-scripts.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+techiebuzz+%28Techie+buzz%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

Pretty ugly. If you now bookmark that web page in Delicious or Diigo, all the tracking stuff is included in the link. I don’t know about you but I just want to bookmark the URL of the web page without all that tracking data. So from the above URL, I just want:

http://techie-buzz.com/google-chrome/google-chrome-now-supports-greasemonkey-scripts.html

You could of course delete all that stuff off the end before you bookmark it, but there’s a simpler way to remove this tracking data in Firefox and Google Chrome. In Firefox, it involves installing a Greasemonkey script, while in Chrome you just install an extension.

Firefox: Greasemonkey script to remove FeedBurner tracking data

First you have to install Greasemonkey. If you haven’t already done this, visit my last post for more info. Then install the FeedBurner Tracking Query Stripper from here. Once installed, when you click a link in Google Reader, the URL will load initially showing the tracking data then, after a second or two, it will magically disappear.

Chrome: Unburner extension to remove Feedburner tracking data

If Google Chrome is your browser, then install the Unburner extension from here. Again, once installed, when you click a link in Google Reader, the URL will load initially showing the tracking data then it will be stripped out.

Now when you follow a link in Google Reader in Firefox or Chrome, all the tracking analytics will be stripped out and the web page will load as it should.

I’ve had my Acer Aspire One netbook running Easy Peasy Linux for just a year now. During that time I’ve always run Firefox as my browser mostly to trawl through my feeds in Google Reader. Up until about a week ago I found I got an error message about an unresponsive script in Google Reader at least once during every session and often when scrolling. Easy enough to clear but quite annoying. I thought this was probably due to memory issues and Firefox – I guessed the Reader webpage was heavy going for a netbook.

So I thought I’d try Google Chrome on the Linux powered netbook to see if it would be any better. I figured that the Google Reader/Chrome combination should have better luck – you’d think that Chrome should have been well tested on Reader by Google.

So I installed Chrome (version 4.0.295.0) easily using instructions I found here. Absolutely no problems with unresponsive scripts when browsing – but as with Firefox, occasionally when scrolling it would lock up for 5-10 seconds and then proceed without problems. So I thought I’d write a post singing the praises of Chrome and slating Firefox for its errors. Problem is that when I went back to check if Firefox was still issuing those error messages, I found that the latest version of Firefox (version 3.0.17; for Ubuntu) which downloaded last weekend seems to have cleared the problem. Both browsers are now running fine on my netbook.

So what about browser speed? Is there a difference there? Well, I set up both browsers with Google Reader as home page and with no other tabs and checked times for clean loading of Firefox and Chrome separately just after booting the netbook. I have 257 Google Reader subscriptions at the moment. Firefox took 48 seconds and Chrome 24 seconds to load the page. Then to reload Firefox again, that took 33 seconds, while Chrome reloaded in 13 seconds.

Google Chrome has gained considerable momentum recently with a growing number of extensions available. Even though Firefox is better than it was in terms of browsing on my netbook, it’s much slower than Chrome for me. So I’m going to move over to Chrome on my Linux netbook and give it a thorough work out.

Incidentally, for anyone interested in keeping up with the latest at Chrome, Lee Mathews at Download Squad has been doing a weekly Chrome Corner post since the end of December last year.

In a recent post on tech tips, I listed Firefox as my current browser of choice. I have also been using Google Chrome for the last 6 months or so and am pretty impressed with it. I do find Firefox slow to load and I find that recent Firefox updates still haven’t resolved the RAM issues. On the other hand, Chrome loads quickly and is pretty responsive.

For the last few days, I’ve been finding Google Reader and Google Mail really slow in Firefox, probably as a result of some disk maintenance I did over the weekend. Probably my fault and I should be able to track the problem with time. However, I’ve found that both Google Reader and Google Mail are still really responsive in Chrome – perhaps not surprisingly – they’re all from the same stable so should work well together. So that got me thinking. I wondered just what else I needed Chrome to be able to do so it might be a real alternative to Firefox. Well, really important to me is a Delicious plug-in like Delicious Bookmarks in Firefox so I can bookmark webpages straight to Delicious from Chrome. I also need LastPass integration with Chrome so I can quickly recall passwords and login to websites. I really like LastPass for password management and have blogged about this before.

Well it turns out that although Chrome doesn’t have plug-ins for these features yet, it does have bookmarklets which give the Delicious and LastPass integration I need. I found these two websites which show how to get the functionality I need in Chrome:

How to make a Delicious ‘Plug-in’ for Chrome

Use LastPass in Chrome

Using Chrome, I’ve also solved another problem that I had had with Google Reader that I had assumed was a fault within Reader but turned out to be due to Firefox. I have over 2000 tags and folders in Google Reader. In Firefox, when I went into Settings in Reader and selected Folders and Tags and scrolled down to the end, the listing ended around the ubuntu tag, i.e. way short of the actual end of the list of tags and folders. However, doing the same thing with Chrome as the browser, my complete list of tags and folders was displayed allowing housekeeping like deleting tags, etc right to the end of the complete list which I couldn’t do in Firefox.

How have you got Chrome up to speed? Drop a comment below.

Edit (13 August 2009): Thanks to Scotian whose comment below solved the slow Firefox problem.  It turns out that the latest Skype extension update for Firefox  slows down Google Reader and Google Mail to a crawl. Just uninstalled the extension and everything is fine again in Firefox.