There are currently two modes for using the “Open In Browser” feature; open in foreground or background. Foreground opens the page in your browser and brings it to the front. Background opens the page without bringing the browser to the front, leaving NNW frontmost.

My sole idea for the already very good NetNewsWire is for the “Open In Browser” feature mode to be single-instance toggle-able by using the Option key, which would open the selected link in the mode opposite that of normal. The keystroke Command-Option-B is not currently used by NNW Lite, but I don’t know about the full version…

The menu entry (under News) should be dynamically labeled depending on whether the option key is pressed. To see this in action, try cruising OmniWeb or the Finder’s menus while pressing and releasing the option key – useful feature variations that don’t interfere with the basic functionality or interface.

I generally prefer that opened links come to the foreground, but this is not the case when there are many unread items, in which case I prefer to cruise through NNW and select certain links to be opened in browser windows which I then bring forward once I’ve gone through all of my unread items.