Now that the dust has settled around Google’s Chrome Frame, let’s take a look at a few thoughts and observations.
First we should realize the caveats and shortcomings of housing a pretty rendering engine in old and dusty car. As Google themselves mention, the plug-in currently has no support for printing and provides no GUI for downloads. And as it turns out, accessibility by means of Assistive Technology is not yet implemented either. Needless to say, this open source plug-in is a pre-beta developer preview, so if all goes well we’ll soon have a properly behaving engine that is virtually indistinguishable to regular users.
Second on the list is a technical breakdown courtesy of Jim Ray, in which he provides a detailed look at the user agent strings, the installation, the plug-in itself and other tidbits. I loved this part:
The irony here, as I see it, is that an old, insecure feature Microsoft built to try to beat Netscape is now being used by Microsoft’s biggest current rival to patch IE. The upside for developers is that Microsoft is going to have a hard time killing Chrome Frame because it actually does the right thing — it’s not hacking IE via undocumented APIs or unscrupulous haxie-like code injection. They used Microsoft’s own well-documented and fully supported platform to do this. Bravo indeed, Google.
The installation procedure is what interests me most about Chrome Frame, because it will make or break this technology. Previous research (like Digg’s) has pointed out that quite a lot of IE6 users simply can’t upgrade. They’re at work and have no control over their machine. Let’s say an IE6 user can and wants to install this plug-in, why didn’t he already upgrade his browser then?
On the other hand, we’re talking Google here, a huge corporation that is synonymous with a browser to a lot of people and that has already manifested itself on a multitude of PC’s in the form of a toolbar. If there’s one company that can pull off a stunt like this, it’s Google. If they incorporate the technology in all of their own products and manage to convince the system administrators worldwide, it’s not unthinkable this plug-in will have an install base just as large as Flash for example.
Also worth mentioning is the fact that Google doesn’t market Chrome Frame as “make your website look good with zero effort” but rather “seamlessly bring Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer”. Perhaps that will be it’s biggest achievement, looking back in a few years. That it brings things like HTML 5, canvas, complex Javascript and more to the masses not only using IE6, but also IE7 and even IE8.
Will Google Chrome Frame indeed be the invisible Trojan horse that will finally defeat “evil IE” and bring victory to the poor web developers? Or is it just a great way to get some attention that will ultimately fail because of the ignorance of the average PC user? Only time will tell, but it’ll sure be fun to watch.