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One of the most recent entrants to this fairly crowded field, is Buzzword by Virtual Ubiquity, which was recently acquired by Adobe.

I tested Buzzword using Firefox 2.0.0.10 and Camino 1.5 on Mac OS X 10.4. Buzzword officially supports Safari 2.0.4 or 3.0.3, Firefox 1.5 (Windows only), Firefox 2.0 (Mac and Windows), Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 or 7.0. I didn’t have any problems with Camino, however. I’m also betting it will run just as well in Opera 9.x. No matter the brower, the Flash Player 9 is required.

Buzzword was developed using Flex (back end) and Flash (front end). The Flash interface means that Buzzword’s front-end has the kind of richness associated with desktop applications. Your default view is a page view, allowing you to see where your document pages break. Formatting controls have a high level of screen-to-print fidelity.

Other notable features?

• Document version history and restore
• Document sharing and collaboration
• Granular control over line and paragraph spacing
• Page headers and footers
• Endnotes (footnotes)
• Drag-able margin control that operates much like Microsoft Word
• Annotate a document with comments
• Numbered scroll bar indicates what page you are viewing
• Inline spell-checking
• Familiar keyboard commands

While Buzzword is darn sexy, it’s not perfect. You can share documents for collaboration or export documents, for example, but you can’t make a document public. You can link to it, but viewers will have to sign up for a Buzzword account. I’d also like to see Buzzword offer an HTTPS option for logins and document editing.

That said, I still feel comfortable making the bold claim that Buzzword is the most robust web word processor available. Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho win for their integration with their other office productivity applications, but Buzzword excels at what it does.

Disagree? Share in the comments.

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