Square Galaxy

A little over a month ago, Google released its own web browser, similar to Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Their new web browser is called Google Chrome, and has some great features and some great speed, but is currently available for Windows only.

I’ve been using it off and on for the last month, and I’ve found a few missing features that really bug me:

No Feed Viewer. When viewing an RSS or Atom feed, such as the one on my site, other modern web browsers will format the feed nicely and perhaps give the user subscription options. With Google Chrome, the feed text is displayed completely unformatted. This makes using and subscribing to feeds with Google Chrome extremely difficult.

No full screen mode.  Sometimes, especially on laptops or when I’m giving web-based presentations to others, I like to put my browser into full screen mode, to maximize the viewable area of the webpage and to remove distractions like browser navigation.  With Firefox or Internet Explorer, you can press the F11 key to enter full screen mode, however there isn’t such a mode in Google Chrome.  Seeing as viewing a presentation in Google Docs is best in full screen mode, I find this missing feature a surprise.

No built in spell checker.  I’m a big fan of having a spell checker built right into the web browser to spell check text fields.  Google Chrome does not have this feature.  So if you see any misspelled words in this post, you can blame it on the fact that I didn’t have a spell checker built in.  The Google web browser toolbar does (or at least used to have) a spell checker, so I find it surprising that this got lost in their web browser.  I would think this feature would be essential for a web browser that is looking to be a web application platform.

No browser certificates. One of the least used features in web browsers are the use of browser certificates.  While most web sites use a username/password credential pair for authentication, some can use a browser certificate for authentication.  While these web sites are very rare, they can be very important in some businesses.  This missing feature probably won’t effect many people, but it could be a deal-breaker for some businesses when they are choosing the best browser for their enterprise.

No page settings for printing. Normally, when a page prints, there are additional headers and footers such as page number, date, title, and web page addresses.  In some cases this may be helpful, but in other cases I may not want this, such as when I’m printing off a web-based document for distribution to others.  Google Chrome has no way to customize these page headers for printing.  Having customizable page headers is important for a web browser that wishes to be a framework for applications that may want the user to print.

I have a project which requires me to print from a web browser. Firefox wasn’t printing things very correctly, which prompted me to consider printing through Google Chrome.

Google Chrome did a reasonable job at rending the pages, but it has one problem. It wants to print headers on the top and bottom of all the pages including: the url, the page title, the date, and the page number. For my print job, I don’t want to reveal all that information, and I would prefer to print my pages without it.

In Firefox, I am given a Page Setup option from the File menu where I can customize headers, footers, and margins for printing. I cannot find any such option in Google Chrome.

In March I ran the Acid 3 web browser stress test against all the most modern browsers at the time to see how they performed. Since then, there are new versions of browsers which justify a re-run of the tests. Here are the results:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 - 71/100
• Google Chrome 0.2.149.29 - 79.100
• Opera 9.52 - 83/100
• Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 - Too bad to tell. Perhaps 5/100?
• Apple’s Safari 3.1.2 (525.21) - 75/100
• Flock 1.2.5 - 53/100

All the web browsers were run on the same Windows XP system.

Then, out of curiosity, I decided to check the memory usage of each browser and found the following:

• Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 - 55M (After all add-ons were turned off)
• Google Chrome 0.2.149.29 - 41M
• Opera 9.52 - 27M (But then crashed on subsequent loads)
• Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 - 41M (But still couldn’t render the test at all)
• Apple’s Safari 3.1.2 (525.21) - 41M
• Flock 1.2.5 - 54M

In my continuing evaluation of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, I was delighted to see that Adobe Flash was included as part of the web browser. This means that I can watch Strongbad’s Emails and Youtube from a device that fits in my pocket.

However, I am disappointed that the version of flash installed does not recognized the built in camera or microphone. This means that I can’t send video messages to my friends on Facebook.

So, plus on the fact that flash is included, but a small negative because the flash doesn’t support that camera.

The Acid tests are various tests for web browsers to see how well they can adhere to standards. If a web browser was a computer science project, these would the tests the teaching assistant would run on your project to see how well you did and to assign you a score.

The Acid3 test was recently released, and I ran it on a few web browsers I had installed here. Here is how they performed:

• Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows: 49/100
• Safari 3.0.4 on Windows: 38/100
• Opera 9.26 on Windows: 46/100
• Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 12? (It was so screwed up I couldn’t hardly see the score)
• Flock 1.1 (based on Firefox) on Windows: 52/100
• Firefox 1.5.0.12 on Linux: 50/100

I also ran it against Konquerer on Linux, but it kept crashing. Other people are reporting other various scores with various versions.

Update March 7. I’m a little confused about how the tests work. For example, I’ve run it multiple times on the Flock browser, but I’ve seen three different scores come out. I’m confused how the same test can yield different results at different browsers on the same browser. I want things to be more deterministic.

Update March 25. I ran the tests against the new Safari 3.1 on windows, and it scored an impressive 75/100.

Update March 26. Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Windows scored for me today a 53/100.