When websites use these common vim keybindings in an attempt to be helpful or "hacker cool", they completely bork my browsing setup until I disable the plugin for that site. My experience after that is usually a mix of awkwardly readjusting to the default browsing setup and reflexively trying to use vimium hotkeys and being surprised when they do something completely different. So, while Google Reader gets much "hacker" praise for its vim hotkeys, they make the site a lot more difficult to use for me -- there, accidentally hitting my "scroll down" button will scroll to the next article and make me lose my place, for example.
To web app developers, I completely understand that vim users that use plugins like vimium are a niche within a niche and not all that important in the grand scheme of things, but we would very much appreciate it if you bury the option to disable vim hotkeys somewhere in your site's settings menu. Very few people may be affected if you don't do this, but to those that are, it's even more frustrating than sites that remap the arrow keys, use touch events on mobile browsers, break "middle click to open in a new tab" functionality for no good reason by using javascript onclick events instead of standard anchor tags, or break pagedown functionality by covering up the top part of the document with a giant floating "like this on twitbook" bar.
With Pentadactyl, what you describe just isn't a problem: the extension captures the keys and prevents websites from screwing that up, unless you want to access them, in which case you just press C-z to enable 'Pass Through' mode.
I realize it's not fair to expect web app developers to adapt to my (or anyone else's) custom browser configuration, but in this particular case, they're adding vim hotkeys primarily as a convenience to fellow vim users, not as a defining feature of their site. Given that, I think they should be aware that there is a subset of those vim users who are negatively affected by their kindness.
Humorously, Chrome just completely crashed while I was writing this (running on the latest Quantal beta), prompting me to remove a bit I wrote about Chrome being more stable than Firefox due to its process isolation. I have a hunch that the fault lied in the Flash plugin, however, which doesn't seem to be terribly stable on Linux. I've never had a browser-wide crash on Chromium in the past, but not being able to watch certain Youtube videos and missing the convenience of Chrome's PDF plugin prompted me switch to it. Not sure I made the right decision.
Would you accept a pull request to satisfy https://github.com/philc/vimium/issues/61?
Like many of the commenters there, I often only find myself reaching for the mouse while browsing to select and copy text.
If it's something you're open to I'd be willing to give it a shot.