The Google team over at the Chromium and Google Chrome blog has just announced earlier today that they are releasing a new IE add-on known as Google Chrome Frame.
From Google:
Today, we’re releasing an early version of Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer.
We’re building Google Chrome Frame to help web developers deliver faster, richer applications like Google Wave. Recent JavaScript performance improvements and the emergence of HTML5 have enabled web applications to do things that could previously only be done by desktop software. One challenge developers face in using these new technologies is that they are not yet supported by Internet Explorer. Developers can’t afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps.
This will allow web pages running inside IE to support Google Chrome technologies and have the performance of Google Chrome, such as HTML 5 and IE6 PNG Transparency without any additional coding past the meta tag.
So how can we use it? First, IE users must install the open source plugin here. However, in order for it to be enabled on web pages, web developers must add the following tag into their head section:
<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1" />
The problem here is that it will take a very long time for all websites to update. In addition, most users that are not satisfied with Internet Explorer will have switched already.
One website that this is enabled for is Google Wave, a new pre-release service from Google that incompatible with Internet Explorer.
Interested in giving this new plugin a try? Remember this is pre-release and it won’t work on websites until they have the meta tag added.
Google Chrome Frame (Google Code)
