When viewing 500+ unread items, I'd say the "Mark all as read" button (Destroyer of Worlds) is just a wee bit too close to the frequently poked "Refresh" button. The first time I got burned by this I wrote a nice email to the Google Reader team, but I guess they still think it's a good idea. I guess it's not a big deal that I have no way of finding out what those 500+ items were that I had yet to read/skim/star/share/skip. Yesterday I took matters into my own hands:
Thank you Greasemonkey. You can find my little script at userscripts.org. It is based on this other script by Scott Cowan. I never thought I'd use Greasemonkey, but Google Reader is just far too dangerous in its unaltered state!
I will say, though, that the addition of search in Google Reader helps to alleviate the loss of all those unread items. It was a long time coming, but it works great. :-)
