New Google Reader

Google relaunched their RSS aggregator a few weeks ago. I was quite a fan of the old version, which was fairly simple - a list of all available messages down the lefthand side, and a big reading pane. Gary didn't like it, because it didn't allow you to view messages by feed, but I quite liked its simplicity.
Their new version is more like other aggregators I've seen - there's a hierarchical list of feeds down the lefthand side, and a scrolling list of messages. It works really well, especially the special functionality that automatically marks messages as read when you scroll past them.  It's still simple looking - a bit like Google Mail - but it works really well. There are two other screens: the home screen; and the all items screen. The home screen is a bit useless, as it only provides a list of the latest two unread messages... The all items is much better, showing all items, which you can filtered by read/unread.
There are two things I don't like about it: it doesn't work well with the SessionSaver/SessionManager plugins in Firefox - it invariably displays an error message when it's shown in a restored tab when FF starts up. It requires me to do a <ctrl>+<f5> to get it working again.
The other thing I don't really like is the "mark as read" check box - it doesn't really change when a message is read/unread. The "shared" icon lights up, the "starred" icon lights up, but the "mark as read" check box stays a very indistinct colour, and a difficult to see check appears.
The "Shared" items functionality is cool - you could do this with the old reader, but you had to do it by tagging messages with a distinct tag. It's much simpler now, and the integration with blogger beta is cool.