Yeah but the tricky part as always is: what counts as a "visit"? If I accidentally hit reload in my browser? Or Firefox unloads the tab and then I switch to i

Yeah but the tricky part as always is: what counts as a "visit"? If I accidentally hit reload in my browser? Or Firefox unloads the tab and then I switch to it briefly before quitting the browser (which probably causes a re-fetch)? Real newsreaders and mailreaders maintain their own "read-ness" bits and give you nice tools for manipulating them effortlessly. Stuff like "catch up" (mark everything read) or "mark subtree as read" or "mark subtree as ignored". Anybody who has used GNUS knows how nice this is. Trying to shoehorn this into a browser worldview is a losing battle.