5 missing features for Google Chrome

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.