arstechnica.com

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.)

mashable.com

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):

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.