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ara pehlivanian

Web Standards, Web Culture, Web Everything.™

A Pain in my Google Reader

Google Reader LogoRecently I started pruning my RSS feeds. I was getting really discouraged by the deluge of stuff that I’d told myself I should be reading. Then I realized of course that I couldn’t possibly keep up with it all. So I chose the ones I read regularly, the ones that kept me the most informed and started cutting the rest. Or at least I tried to. Google Reader was throwing an error in Firefox that kept me from deleting feeds. It worked fine in IE though, so I went there and did some of the pruning. I also tried sending Google a report on the error so that they could fix it. Never heard back from them. So in the hopes that maybe someone from Google is scanning the blogosphere for articles on Google Reader, here’s an exact copy of my report:

Hi,

I’d like to report a bug in the Subscription Management page. I get the following JavaScript error when clicking the trash can next to a feed:

e has no properties
Zc(["feed/http://xml.newsisfree.com//feeds/43/243.xml" ], Object)889806413-lens.js (line 180)
Xg( mouseup clientX=25, clientY=324)                             889806413-lens.js (line 172)
d–}}};w[_P].Zc=function(a,b){var c=Vc(a,”subs-label”);for(var d=0,e;e=c[d];d++)…

I realize that the code’s obfuscated so the stack trace probably doesn’t tell you much, but I’m sure it’ll give you an idea as to the source of the problem. Here’s some browser/OS info on which I found the bug:

Browser: Firefox 1.5.0.9
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Professional (2002) SP2
JavaScript Console: Firebug Firefox Extension

Checking a box next to a feed and then clicking the “Unsubscribe” form button at the top of the page yields the exact same error (minus the stack trace).

I’ve also tried the same functionality with IE6 and it works fine. I hope you can find a solution (or tell me if I’m doing something wrong) so that I can resume using your service as soon as possible!

Thanks again for a great product!

Ara

Has anyone else had this problem?

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4 Comments

  1. Gravatar for Mihai ParparitaMihai Parparita says:

    I’m not having any luck reproducing this, in either Firefox 1.5 or 2.0. Does this happen with a particular subscription or with all of them? Did the subscription have any tags?

    Mihai Parparita
    Google Reader Engineer

  2. Gravatar for Ara PehlivanianAra Pehlivanian says:

    Mihai: Okay, I found the problem. It was a Firefox extension named Firebug v1.0b1. I uninstalled it and Google Reader started working. Firebug is currently at version 1.0b9 and the bug that caused the conflict seems to have been fixed in this more recent version.

  3. Gravatar for Mihai ParparitaMihai Parparita says:

    Great, thanks for tracking it down.

    Mihai Parparita
    Google Reader Engineer

  4. Gravatar for TOMASTOMAS says:

    Well Ara, it looks like you got your answer (I was going to respond by saying that I’ve done this successfully in Firefox with no issue). I hear you about trimming down the number of RSS feeds. I created a folder called “feeds-that-distract-me” which houses any feeds that are new or I haven’t found much benefit from reading. So far, I’ve been able to unsubscribe from a couple that way.

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