“Google yesterday dropped a bomb at Redmond.”

“Bomb!!! are you kidding or it’s just another bad joke from you?”

“Wait wait it’s not, instead it’s true that Google did drop a bomb but it’s not similar to normal bomb that you and me have seen in the movies, it’s a different one… yes it’s a different one and it’s called Chrome Frame. You might be wondering what’s this, no worry just have a little more patience you will get to know what it is.”

Nuff’ said… let’s explain what it is all about, Chrome Frame is Google’s effort to kick Internet Explorer in it’s arse, yes in it’s arse, in fact in Microsoft’s arse, this is a simple plugin( yes simple from User’s point of view) for Internet Explorer(6, 7 and 8), which does a “cool thing“, it replaces IE’s decade old, shitty rendering engine a.k.a Trident with Google Chrome’s high performance rendering engines ( Webkit for HTML-CSS and V8 for JavaScript), so once you have installed this plugin you can have Chrome’s super fast rendering engine inside IE. Isn’t this a real cool thing?? By the way it’s still in beta and the awesome thing is that it’s OpenSource. This is what our Alex Russel ( Creator of DOJO JavaScript Library ) has been doing since he joined Google, great job done.

We all know that developing rich web applications these days is a pain if we need to support Internet Explorer but the crude fact is that we can’t ignore IE because of its market share, which is still more than 60%. And Microsoft is somewhat reluctant or don’t know what, in pushing new developments for IE, so it has become stagnant for some years and lagging far behind in features and performance than other modern browsers. Microsoft did try to fix this in their effort of developing IE8 which is a better browser than both of it’s ancestors, but it failed to gain enough momentum. As Microsoft also extended support for IE 6 till 2014 (Win XP support ends in that year), so there was a real or quick need of a solution which can help developers and users to reap the real benefit of modern rich web applications. So here comes the Google Chrome Frame, which is supposed to fill this gap, until Microsoft fixes it’s browsers or decides to use Webkit and V8 as it’s rendering engine . Recent surveys regarding IE6 market share reveal that almost 70% IE users are not able to upgrade their browsers due to some other reasons for example : old OS, corporate policy, govt policy etc, so this is a nice alternative for them (though Chrome Frame requires Win XP, but it’s still in beta so lets see) and as far as I guess this plugin was intended for big Corporate Houses who still use IE 6  because they have some in-house applications which only works in IE 6 or may b uses IE’s ActiveX controls, so this is a answer for them, now if Google can convince those business organizations about this then we might soon have Chrome Frame installed in most of them.

The Chrome Frame blog and developer’s guide has detailed the installation process and the usage, please check out the below link for more information regarding this:

http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html

Finally as a Web Developer/Frontend Engineer I’d love to see Chrome Frame in all IE6/7 browsers, because this will surely make my life less painful and I’ll focus more on developing cool applications than spending ‘countless hours’ to fix IE bugs. This is a serious attempt from Google to fix the mess, so now let’s see how much response it gains, by the way I do hope for the best, rest is up to the users and decision makers.

Cheers!!! that’s why I love you so much Gooooooooogle.