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.

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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.

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• 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

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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.

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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.

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This report comes as Firefox 3 is in its sixth alpha version. Firefox 3 will have a number of new features and refinements, including support for “contentEditable” fields, better memory management, text zoom memory, native ogg audio/video support, and many other features.

Feed free to find out more about Firefox, including the ability to download Firefox with the Google Toolbar.

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One of the search queries on my other blog was: firefox how to keep ip address off internet. I thought I would help this person out and explain things to them.

When you load up a web page, Firefox (or any Internet browser) sends a request to a web server that in English might say, “Please send the contents of this page http://example.com/ back to me at address 10.1.2.3.” The web server receives this request and sends the contents of the page back to Firefox at the provided address where it is displayed to the user. This makes it really difficult to download web pages while not revealing your IP (Internet Protocol) address to others.

There are ways by using a proxy so that your address doesn’t go all the way to the end web server. In this way, your browser sends the request to the proxy, and the proxy creates its own request to the web server. The web server sends the page contents to the proxy, and the proxy forwards the contents back to your Firefox browser as a response to your original request.

There is this proxy service out there called the Anonymizer which does this sort of thing. I believe they charge money for their service, but you might be able to find a similar service out there. I do not endorse or recommend any products, I’m only stating here that they exist.

Firefox however, is a browser that is designed to be more secure and keep your information more private. You can download it by clicking here.

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I really just liked it because it seemed very professional and very well done.

I encourage everyone to use Firefox all the time. You can download it by clicking on the link on this page.

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Oh, and you can download Firefox with the Google toolbar by clicking here.

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