Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox captured the browser headlines this week, igniting a new discussion about performance increases and possible new features that are likely to drive a new round of innovations. Here is our list of the ten features – five for Chrome, five for Firefox – which we would like to see in the next versions.
Chrome
1. Browser add-ons: No browser is perfect, particularly Chrome. We want compatibility with Firefox add-ons in Chrome. Better yet, connect Google gadgets to Chrome and you have an instant add-on-galore and a powerful open-source add-on platform that extends beyond the iGoogle home page.
2. Themes: We would want o see an SDK to enable the development of themes that will make it easy to change the UI. Allow users to connect themes with custom add-ons (see previous bullet) and make it easy to apply themes with a single click and you have a winner.
3. Online repository: What about an App Store for Chrome? What about an online content repository for all things Chrome: Themes, add-ons, plugins, etc. Integrate it neatly into Chrome UI, like Apple did with the iTunes Store for the iPhone. Such a feature could also extend to saving user settings, bookmarks and history in the cloud – like Weave for Firefox.
4. Security and privacy: No need to re-invent the wheel here. Google should just copy Firefox 3’s options against malware and phishing and IE8’s excellent privacy settings and we won’t complain. We wouldn’t mind to get highly granular security and privacy settings and on a per-site basis make provide clear warnings when malware is encountered.
5. Put Chrome in Android: Chrome is based on the WebKit rendering engine, which is easily deployed across various form-factors, so it shouldn’t be difficult to get Chrome into Android. Chrome and Android sounds like a winning combination to us.
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