What is missing from Google Chrome?

Google chrome is one of the most simple and innovative browser from the Google stable. It is having some really very cool stuff. Google chrome also have the credit of being the first in many aspects, like search from the address bar. Google Chrome is the only Google product that shed the beta label just months after the first public release while, for comparison, Google Docs stayed in beta for 3 years and Gmail took 5 years to graduate from the Google Labs.

Google Chrome has been around for more than a year with three majors releases but there are few very basic features that should have been there from day one but are still missing in Chrome. So lets see what are the things that are missing from Google chrome. When I am talking about things missing from Google Chrome, I am actually referring to pretty simple stuff that are missing.

Here is the list of a few of them:

1. Subscription to RSS feed: There is no simple way in which you can subscribe. Lets say you are reading a blog in Google Chrome and you would like to subscribe to it inside the Google Reader. In that case you have two choices, either you have to install bookmarklets or need to manually copy-paste the URL into Google Reader. There has to be a more simpler way to achieve the same.
2. Email a Page or Link: Despite the dramatic changes in the way communication is done, the good old email is still the most preferred mode for sharing web pages on the Internet. Yet Chrome offers no native option for sending pages or hyperlinks by email. So that is another simple miss.
3. No shortcut to Exit: There is an issue with the exit from Google Chrome.  Like all other Windows applications, Chrome supports the Alt+F4 keyboard shortcut to help you close the current Chrome window. However, if you have two or more instances of Chrome running simultaneously, the only way you can close them all is with your mouse (click the Tools icon and choose Exit). A shortcut key to access that tools icon would be great.
4. Creating Bookmarks:Imagine a situation where you have a number of tabs open in Chrome but have to close the browser so that someone else in the family or in the work place can use the system. What is the option that you have? How do you save all your bookmarks to a folder so that you can easily resume work later? There isn’t any in Chrome.
5. Viewing Page Properties: Many a time you might wish to know the size of an image embedded in a page. In Chrome you cannot do that unless you are a bit knowledgeable about HTML codes. Google is probably trying to keep the contextual menu in Chrome simple but a menu item like “Image Properties” is extremely essential. So another miss, simple yet important.
6. Issues reading blog feeds in Chrome: It has always been rare to get pointers to RSS feeds in search results in Google. Opera is brilliant at rendering raw RSS feeds, Firefox will auto-open the feed in your default RSS reader, IE will show a formatted view of the XML file but raw feeds in Chrome are often difficult to understand.
7. Web History: You can easily get the web history by doing a Ctrl + H in Chrome. However the issue is not that. The issue is with the grouping of the sites in the history. The information is not grouped by date or domain. So it is difficult to know which page on a particular website you visited on last Friday.
8. Page Title: In IE or Firefox, if you ever need to copy the title of a page, you can simply do a right click and choose “View Page Info”. A similar feature is available in Chrome but it would only tell you about your last visit to that site.If I want to get the title of that page without looking at the HTML source, then it is not possible in Chrome. So it also calls for a simpler solution.
9. Confusing Tabs: Chrome hide the favicons and shrink the existing tab to make space for more tabs.  This results in confusion for heavy users who are used to work on multiple tabs at the same time. They might not be able to recognize what is there inside each tab. Another simple and small miss but important one nonetheless.
10. Download Manager: The download manager takes lot of space in the status bar. There should be a way to run the download in the background or make it disappear after the downloads are done.

The browser is no doubt an innovative attempt fulfilling needs of the new age browsing. However, this simple misses can be easily removed to make it more wholesome.

Related reading : Comparing various browsers.