“Google brings Chrome’s renderer to IE with browser plugin”
Google has a plan to drag IE into the world of modern browsing by building a plugin that will allow it to use Chrome’s HTML renderer and high-performance JavaScript engine.
Wow. This is amazing, and unexpected. Running Google Chrome in an MSIE plugin — it’s so obvious, in retrospect! Those users who resist installing a new browser (or can’t because of lazy sysadmins) will be much more liable to install a plugin, especially one that’s branded by Google.
It’s such a simple idea, why didn’t anyone do it before? (Partly because it’s not that simple, technologically, I’ll wager.)
Their ace in the hole? None other than Google Wave, the highly anticipated real-time communication platform that will launch to the public next week. Today, on the Google Wave Developer Blog, the company essentially said this: if you want to use Google Wave, Install the Chrome Frame or drop Microsoft’s browser.
I’m not sure how much power Google Wave is really going to have in driving Chrome Frame’s adoption (YouTube would provide a much better incentive — and I’m sure it soon will, as Google knows this just as well), but that doesn’t matter: as soon as the plugin reaches 1.0 (it’s “early-stage
” right now, whatever that means — Google can’t use the word “beta” anymore to denote anything, it would be meaningless), many webmasters will be requiring its installation. The instructions to do so are here, even though it’s a little early for anyone to make end-users install it — but there’s information on how to get your PHP scripts to detect whether Chrome Frame is installed (look for “chromeframe” in the user agent string), and alter your site’s layout and functionality accordingly.
It just takes a single meta tag to get your pages to render in Chrome Frame when it’s available, and I’m going to add it to all my pages right away (and so are you):
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
This is huge for all webdesigners: even though for most sites you can’t afford to require a compulsory plugin install, it will still become that much easier to convince our bosses and clients that it’s okay to leave vanilla-MSIE6 users hanging dry with a reduced-functionality version of the site, since pretty soon most of the Internet Explorer laggards will be getting the site in Chrome Frame anyway.
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garoo, 5 years ago:
JS libs don't take care of everything, and even if they did they wouldn't nearly be as reliable (or efficient) as a real rendering engine.
Users install plugins pretty easily on IE, and the ability to access some sites, such as Wave, isn't a "non-obvious reason." People who don't want to switch browsers because they're afraid it's gonna be too complicated won't switch to Firefox or Chrome just because their friends tell them that Wave is cool, but if all they have to do is click "ok" to install a plugin, and it changes nothing at all in the way they work with their browser, they'll do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Facebook pushed their users to install it, too. That would be an even better killer app than YouTube.
ludo, 5 years ago:
that Wave becomes a hugely popular tool is not that obvious...
and MS will eventually catch up - speed wise - with chrome sooner or later...
garoo, 5 years ago:
Oh, it will be popular, at least at first: people will want to play with it.
And it's not about Microsoft catching up, it's about the users. I have nothing against IE7 or IE8 (I don't really care about how much faster one JS engine is than the other), but the entire web is still limited by IE6 compatibility.
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ludo, 5 years ago: