Comments on: Chrome Frame: Inject Chrome into IE

By: sfaok

sfaok — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:13:07 +0000

I feel like a little dorky kid on Christmas morning. Still, I don’t think this is a cure-all or something to get upset about. I think it needs to be thought of a lot like Flash. IE users install Flash almost universally. They have no idea what Flash does. I’m sure when prompted for Silverlight, they install that, too. I’m not going to sit here and claim that Chrome will get 95% install rate, but this allows web standards to reach a lot of that audience that doesn’t understand what it means to either install flash or install a new browser.

i’m currently building a site that will have a relatively mac-ish audience, so this just makes me feel even more empowered to implement some CSS3 and not worry about IE.

By: ThomasHansen

ThomasHansen — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 07:15:35 +0000

@Alex Russell
If this works, I must congratulate you on basically single-handed having upgraded the entire web and saved our souls!
.
GREAT news…!

By: SchizoDuckie

SchizoDuckie — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 02:34:35 +0000

This is *seriously* awesome!

We’ve just stopped supporting IE6 on http://www.soccerway.com and i will definately plug this in the dev team. Die IE6 Die!

By: sos

sos — Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:14:55 +0000

OK, so I’m answering my own question. Browser detection with Google Frame enabled on a site tells you that it’s Chrome, version 4 currently.

By: Joeri

Joeri — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:46:52 +0000

Let’s be realistic though, enterprises could always deploy firefox alongside IE6, and place shortcuts on the desktop launching IE6 only for those legacy intranet apps. That they don’t is probably because firefox is too hard to deploy in corporate environments. Chrome frame, as it exists right now, is no better. I see this plugin having a lot of potential, because it can be deployed without user retraining, but to realize that potential it will need to be easy to manage centrally.

By: randomrandom

randomrandom — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 17:29:29 +0000

A quote from Charles Miller (from Simon Willison’s Weblog):
“Ask browser users, and they’ll tell you the overwhelming reason why they can’t upgrade to a more modern, standards-compliant browser is because their work won’t let them. Ask IT departments why this is the case and they’ll point to the six- to seven-figure costs of upgrading turn-of-the-century Intranets written to work in, and only in, Internet Explorer 6. Google have provided a way for websites to opt out of IE6 (and even IE7) support without requiring enterprise-wide, Intranet-breaking browser upgrades.”
- Charles Miller

By: souders

souders — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 15:38:21 +0000

When looking at the “stuck in IE6″ issue, it’s important NOT to seek a 100% solution. There are some people that will never upgrade until they replace their PC. But a large segment of the IE6 population is there because of legacy (corp) web apps. Chrome Frame is a solution for these users. More importantly, it’s a solution that their IT departments can support – force IE6 on everyone’s PC for the legacy app, but install Chrome Frame so other web sites can take advantage of HTML5, faster performance, etc.

By: sos

sos — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 11:48:10 +0000

What does this mean for JavaScript code that detects the browser version? Will it say Chrome or IE? If it says Chrome, then corporate apps could break, but if it says IE, some code that relies on things like Canvas & SVG might refuse to run

Another reason to use feature detection I guess.

By: samuelcotterall

samuelcotterall — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:44:48 +0000

I’m really pleased that Google are doing this, and thinking of ways of enhancing the web for users of older browsers. However, I have a couple of concerns:

Firstly, when most IE6/7 users don’t upgrade their browser because they are either ignorant to the fact that they are running an old browser (or simply don’t care) or don’t have administrative rights to the machine what is to say that they are going to install an additional plug-in such as Chrome Frame.

Secondly, I am worried that this is going to muddy the water around these lower-end browsers. “I don’t need to upgrade, Chrome Frame works just fine” and cause confusion amongst the less savvy users.

Still, it’ll be interesting to see how this develops. As zachstronaut says, maybe this will lead the way for the detached rendering engine—serving, or at least switching, the engine to your specification.

By: rborn

rborn — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:33:48 +0000

From the developer point of view, is great, but from the normal user point of view, believe me, they don’t give a sh*t. They hardly find the R letter on the keyboard, do you think they are able to make any difference between IE and FF ? And for the other users, more advanced that uses their computers all day long, but not for developing, like writers, designers, etc – do you really they care? They don’t , they reinstall windows every 3 month, they clean up the viruses every week, and they open IE each time they are getting in the net. What about the big corporations? – yesterday Vodafone, sent to their servers all my personal data using guess what: IE6…
A plugin is hard to implement it in the real world – not our geeky world – maybe if we would be able to do something like FLash does – “Do u wanna see this – install this”.
But this will break all the accessibility rules, and make you loose part of the visitors( most of them ), so again is not a solution. I donno.

By: pmontrasio

pmontrasio — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 10:22:04 +0000

@randomrandom: Netscape was better than any IE up to IE4, but IE5 was so better than Netscape that I had to switch. IE6 definitely won the browser war. MS disbanded the IE dev team, the Firefox started and took the lead in terms of performances. It was so better than IE6 that I switched to it.

Then came Safari and Chrome and MS started to try to catch up with IE7 and 8. Opera has been a 1-2% browser during all the period which means that either they don’t care about the desktop (they do fairly well on mobile devices) or their technical and marketing strategy is deeply flawed.

By: BonoboBoner

BonoboBoner — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:14:45 +0000

I love Google. Us getting rid of IE without users actually getting rid of IE. BRILLIANT!

By: igitur

igitur — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:51:32 +0000

I can’t figure out whether Google Chrome Frame will auto-update. Anybody knows?

By: Spellcoder

Spellcoder — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:51:04 +0000

Although it’s not a new idea (people have been trying to get Gecko to run in Internet Explorer), it’s a nice one. Good to have a way to get SVG, , , CSS3, quick js engine. But I’ll probably only help with homeusers, since large companies will block plugin installs. Even then users need a reason to install them. (as in: their favorite website won’t work without)

But a nice aspect compared to older project like this is the fact that a meta tag can be used to select the renderengine instead of needing an ActiveX object on the page.

These are the Gecko in IE projects I know of:

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm (Mozilla ActiveX control, last version was in 2005 ?)

http://starkravingfinkle.org/blog/2006/12/xule-what-if/ (dec 2006)

As for the idea to have Javascript do layout, some frameworks allready do this (or part of it). The framework we make at our company also lets Javascript do a lot of layout. All screens are defined in XML files in which all components/layout can be set in chars, pixels or parts (and min or max sizes if needed). The Javascript side calculates all needed space and sizes of all components and updates the layout.

By: Joeri

Joeri — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 07:01:31 +0000

It’ll stand or fall with how easy it is to roll out in corporate environments. You’re going to need policy integration, centralized deployment and update management (no automatic updates without admins approving them first). This is where firefox has historically been weak, and why it hasn’t managed to put a foot down in enterprise circles.

If chrome frame manages to offer these things, I expect it will get deployed in quite a few places, possibly bringing IE6 down to “ignorable” market share levels, which would be just plain awesome.

By: ShawnK

ShawnK — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:37:20 +0000

I don’t know about everyone else, but I love this.
On the downside anyone who forces use of this may lose clientele, but in a positive aspect this is just another reason for Microsoft to keep improving the Internet Explorer engine.

They have come a long way in the past year, but Internet explorer is nowhere near the expectations of many developers.
I use Firefox myself and I don’t necessarily mind IE7+, but it kills me to see anyone still using IE6!

By: SleepyCod

SleepyCod — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:35:07 +0000

I didn’t ready carefully but you get all the chrome stuff, V8, webkit…in IE with that one. I’m blown away these guys move so fast ;)

By: kea

kea — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 06:33:30 +0000

It’s not a brilliant idea to hack IE, IMO.
As for Silverlight appearing in FF, it seems that I’ve got it in FF by installing it in IE. It was automatically injected into FF, I was kinda “hey what is it doing in my FF?”. Also I haven’t explicitly installed Microsoft .NET Assistant (I even don’t know what assist does it make), WPF and Microsoft DRM plugins into FF.
So Microsoft do care about FF (in quite a weird way :) ) and updates *cough* it, why can’t Google make the same with IE?

Anyways I think neither G nor MS are right in this situation.

By: SleepyCod

SleepyCod — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 05:00:55 +0000

Amazing!

Sounds like the biggest announcement I’ve heard so far this year!!
Don’t get me wrong google guys but the same concept has been launched a while ago by the Mozilla foundation and Adobe with the ScreamingMonkey project, the context was a bit different though as it was not the renderer but the scripting engine (Tamarin).

So what are the plans? Will you be able to embed the V8 engine in IE pretty soon with the renderer?

Think I’m gonna love IE again…

By: GlenLipka

GlenLipka — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 04:23:30 +0000

This was a good idea last year, and it’s still a good idea. http://commadot.com/browser-possession/

However, I think it should be taken further. Chrome should allow Firefox rendering and even IE6 rendering. Intranet admins want to allow users to upgrade their browsers WITHOUT upgrading the intranet. If they could enter a meta tag to render with IE6, then it would solve their problems. Allow web developers to test their apps in ONE browser and define the rendering engine. We will build much better apps this way. Then you don’t need to worry about “breaking the web” when you upgrade a browser.

Anyone who complains of hijacking…are you serious? What do you think Flash is? It’s a rendering engine that the web developer gets to define.

Cross-browser dev/testing is holding back huge improvements in user experience. Alex, awesome work. I hope the Chrome team takes the concept even further.