image credit: Wessex Archaeology

That appears to be Google’s tactic. A few days ago they announced a new plugin for IE 6, 7, and 8 called Chrome Frame. It’s available now as a developer preview so you have to prepend “cf:” before the “http” in all URLs, but for a first release it’s admirably cohesive and powerful.

Creating a Better Experience
What it does is replace IE’s decrepit page display code and javascript code with Chrome’s. Everything else about IE stays the same, appearance, bookmarks, history, options, tabs, everything. It’s simply that suddenly IE is as fast and modern as Chrome.

And it really is as fast as Chrome. “Notably, IE8’s SunSpider scores with Chrome Frame running equaled Google’s Chrome browser, a solid indication that the plug-in effectively turns any version of IE into the speed equivalent of Chrome itself.”

Users can install the plugin with a single click, without relaunching the browser, and even without administrator privileges. Websites can go so far as to present visitors with the ability to do just this. (More info is available on Google’s Dev FAQ.)

Using the Competition’s Downfalls To Their Advantage
The beautiful irony here is that this uses an old Microsoft technology they built in the ’90s to make IE more flexible than Netscape Navigator. And yet, here it is a decade later being used by one of their biggest competitors to help usher their dilapidated browser into bygone history. Even better, that same feature is what powers most IE toolbars so it’s not going to be closed any time soon.

Fixing What’s Holding Them Back
Everything Google makes could be made more easily, more quickly,and with better features if they didn’t have to support any version of IE, but especially IE 6 which is still the most popular browser globally (by age it would be in second grade now). GMail uses HTML 5’s local database features, GMaps and Latitude use the new GeoLocation javascript spec to locate your position. In doing these, they’ve shown that they can code around IE’s nuisances as we all must, but this takes time, costs money, and is really, really unpleasant. Imagine if Reader, Docs, Calendar could work offline such as when you’re on a plane and then when you get connected again they would then sync all of their changes to the server. IE8 finally caught up to all other browsers and introduced support for this (yet IE6 and 7 clearly are not going away). Or what if Picasa let you edit your photos via HTML 5’s <canvas> feature? This is already supported to degrees in everything except IE.

Google’s stance is that which many developers feel: IE is very literally holding us back and it needs to stop.

Late To The Game
It wasn’t until last month — August 7 — that Microsoft finally issued a public statement with meat on their thoughts about HTML 5. A whopping 5 years after developers and browser makers started the process! This complete silence had an awful lot of us worried about the thorns IE could present in the future and probably was no small part of Google’s decision to undermine IE’s stranglehold on its stalwarts.

Giving Us A Choice
IE is not going to die by attrition. No one action or event is ever going to make two-thirds of everyone on the internet give up on the browser they use. This will help for sure, that it doesn’t require administrator privileges for installation is an unbelievable coup d’état. Three out of four people on Digg who use IE6 use it because they don’t have a choice. Well, they’ve got a choice now.

I know that from now on all of my personal work is going to include the simple code from Google to use Chrome Frame if installed, and offer to install it if it’s not. It’s too easy and nightmare-reducing not to!

Phil Dokas