Why did I create it: I use a feed reader too to read the posts of the
groups i subscribed from google groups. I click on the the links on
summary/description of each post in my reader. Then I reach the page
with only one post, then I click on another link to reach to the
thread. I find do that fewtimes everyday really painful.

example useage:

browse.pl
browse.pl perl.beginners
browse.pl comp.unix.shell

(comp.lang.perl.misc is the default group)

------------------------------------------------------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl
#browse.pl

use strict;
use warnings;
use WWW::Mechanize;

my $browser_path = '/cygdrive/c/Program\ Files/Mozilla\ Firefox/
firefox.exe ';
my $group_name = 'comp.lang.perl.misc'; # default group. it will be
used if you don't provide one as parameter
$group_name = $ARGV[0] if @ARGV; # user specified group, from
commandline parameter
my $url = 'http://groups.google.com/group/'.$group_name.'/topics?
gvc=2';
my $limit = 10; # limit number of posts to open

print "Group: [$group_name]\n";
my $m = WWW::Mechanize->new();
print "Getting $limit links of threads...\n";
$m->get($url);
my $html = $m->content();
#print $html;

my @links = ($html =~ m{<td><a href="(/group/$group_name/browse_thread/
thread/[^/]+/[^/]+)#[^/]+">}igs);
if (@links)     {
        @links = map {'http://groups.google.com' . $_} @links;
        my @links_limited = splice @links, 0, $limit;
        my $url_string = sprintf (qq/"%s"/, join q/" "/, @links_limited);
        #print $url_string."\n";
        print "Opening browser...\n";
        system ($browser_path . $url_string . ' &');

So, anyone interested to enhance it?

Sorry for the typos. :-s