Last September I first wrote about Google’s reimagining of what a web browser should be and the technology that they use to do that, all of this to improve the user experience of web apps including Google Apps, and most other HTML5 or Javascript heavy web sites. Today, just little more than 12 months after the first Chrome release, Google released an Internet Explorer plug-in that ports the Chrome rendering engine and Javascript engine (aka V8) to a wider audience. This plug-in, Google Chrome Frame, is activated by code inserted in the <head> section of an HTML document,
With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5′s offline capabilities and
<canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.
Google says that this plug-in is activated at the discretion of the web app developer with a line of HTML code, <meta-http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">, When this line is detected in a page by Google Chrome Frame then it auto-magically activates the WebKit rendering engine and V8 while still maintaining the familiar IE user interface. This plug-in allows IE users to get standard-conforming (Acid3 test) Javascript for the first time.
It’s also noted in the Google blog post that this will allow modern web apps, like Google Wave, to consumers. My sneaking suspicion is that this was the easiest way to get Wave to sing on Internet Explorer… or possibly the only way. No matter what the case, this plug-in seems brilliant. My remaining question is whether employers/IT departments will allow Google Chrome Frame to be installed on employees’ machines. A lot of companies (and the US government) solely utilize IE because of it’s easy policy modification (using tools provided by Microsoft or Novell); I have not yet discovered whether Google Chrome Frame conforms to these policies.
Google also posted a video on YouTube that explains what this is and why it was created in the typical Google video style (including being in HD):