Die IE Die!

If there is one thing which annoys every web developer and designer it has got to be Internet Explorer and more importantly IE6. The sad fact is that a good percentage of internet users still use the age old browser either out of ignorance or force. There are many companies which use IE6 for the Intranet and installing another browser would be prohibited or the installation would involve huge deployment costs and with no alternative, the employees will be forced to use this age old browser which doesn’t confirm to any of the latest web standards.

Building web applications which use the recent HTML 5 canvas tag, java script performance features etc is not supported on IE and it is also not feasible to ignore the IE users because they still form a good percentage of the lot. Most of the developers spend a lot of time doing work around for IE users like writing different style sheets or the worst part is they ignore some of the features.

Enter “Google Chrome Frame” which is a plugin for IE and it brings in all the open web technologies in Google Chrome to the Internet Explorer. To simply put it, we can get a chrome browser inside IE by using this plugin.

If you are a developer:

All you have to do is just enter this single tag at the top of your code

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

When this code is detected by Chrome Frame it switches over to use the web kit rendering engine and makes things awesome.

Why is Google doing it?
1. Google wants to make the web better. Understood!
2. Increase the penetration of Chrome. Most of the companies which have used IE for eons will never switch over to Chrome. This may serve as a nice incentive to try Chrome without making major changes.
3. Making Google Wave run on IE 6 will be a herculean task and the Chrome frame will ease out a lot of pain to the developers.
4. A nice way to tell Microsoft to stop IE6 support?! May be!

The big question is how many of the IE6 users are going to install the Chrome frame plugin. If they have been on IE6 for so long without having the urge to upgrade they will continue to be and the developers will keep figuring out workarounds as new technologies emerge.

Image Credit: oneBlog