Google Fixes IE for Microsoft

Posted on 23-09-2009

Microsoft IE is a product so badly broken, that people have had to work around it instead of with it. With Microsoft still slow to adapt to the latest technologies of the web it has now takes a competing company to fix it, just so that the web can move on!

Google's Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in for IE which replaces the Internet Explorer "Trident" Engine with the Chrome engine, if it detects a web-page configured for Chrome.

A majority of users still use one of the Internet Explorer browsers, and that essentially means that any website built on new technologies such as HTML5 have to have an alternate / stripped down version which works on IE.

In a blog post announcing the availability of Google Chrome Frame, Google explains that it is the need for fast and rich applications such as the coming Google Wave, that has defined this need. As the post says:

"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."

The solution is to simply throw out the rotten core which is "Trident" and replace it with the goodness of WebKit. However to make websites even more compatible Google's Chrome Frame will only step in when the the browser detects a specific meta tag, so that websites designed with IE in mind can go on operating normally, and those wishing to seek the benefit of a modern web rendering engine can enter the tag:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

To have it display in Chrome.

A sorry few might just switch to IE with Chrome thanks to this, but it isn't really a victory for Microsoft, a browser's layout engine is its heart and core, and it is what most developers would love to discard.