[besson3c]

I'm pretty excited by this:

Google Chrome Frame - Google Code

This is an obvious inconvenience to make IE users install this for general purpose pages, but it's tempting nonetheless. Slashdot ran a story about Javascript benchmarks being 9.6 times faster than IE 8, so for JS heavy sites maybe this would be a reasonable justification? This would also allow us to use HTML 5 stuff, and to support CSS 3 attributes like box-shadow and border-radius and stuff like that.

Microsoft, of course, is displeased with this because they claim this makes IE less secure, which might be true. I bet it pissed them off too

As you probably know, Chrome is a Webkit browser, so this basically transforms IE into Safari in a way, which may be useful for developing sites that one might want to optimize for the iPhone and devise a single consolidated experience? Firefox and Safari have gotten so close that you can pretty much count on their experiences being identical the vast majority of the time.

How do you see this playing out?

[Chuckit]

Why on earth would anybody use this?

[besson3c]

Well, why don't you start with some of the reasons I've given, or the reasons listed on the webpage?

What makes you so quick to form your judgments?

[Chuckit]

Neither your post nor Google's page explains why this is a superior option to Chrome, Firefox and Safari. This seems like nothing more than an inelegant way to run Chrome.

[chabig]

It's not a superior option to Chrome, Firefox, of Safari. It's a superior option to IE.

[besson3c]

Yeah, what makes you think that this is supposed to be a superior option to the other browsers? This is for making supporting IE a little easier.

[Chuckit]

But you're not supporting IE. You're turning IE into another browser. So I don't see why you'd use this rather than just installing another browser.

[besson3c]

Because it is far easier and quicker to get IE users to install this plug via ActiveX control than to switch browsers and have to get them to change their habits, figure out how a new bookmarks system works, get them comfortable with the idea of change, re-establish cookies and form autofill data (I don't know if IE and/or importing from IE manages this off the top of my head), etc.

If it was so easy to get people to switch off of IE it would have been done now. There are certainly all kinds of reasons to switch and have been for years! This is a way to quasi-"support" IE but not at the same time.

[Chuckit]

That's not why people don't switch from IE. They don't switch from IE because they're either lazy or need to use some site that only works on IE, and that's the same reason those people won't install this.

[besson3c]

If the HTML tag to switch on this plugin is not included on a webpage, it will render the page with the usual IE rendering engine. This does not change all pages to render in Webkit.

The lazy argument is true, but installing browser plugins in IE is so easy that maybe this would help break down that barrier.

[TheoCryst]

Installing this plugin is as simple as, or simpler than, installing Flash on IE. If a site's HTML requests the plugin, it pops up a panel that asks you to perform a quick, one-click install. The user doesn't even need to relaunch the browser, and the page is being rendered through Chrome's renderer. It's actually pretty brilliant, since it takes so little effort on the part of the end user.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Chuckit 

Why on earth would anybody use this?

An end-user wouldn't on their own. But it's pretty easy to see why a web designer would want to use this (and ask visitors to install it on visiting their site), because then they wouldn't have to bend over backwards to get their site to work properly in the broken mess that is IE.

It's also an attempt to get traction for HTML 5 by working around IE. Previously, the argument's been that HTML 5 is neat, but it will never catch on because Microsoft will never support it, and thus web developers won't want to shut out most of their customers by using it. Now HTML 5 can be used despite IE, and thus, maybe it'll become prevalent (forcing MS to actually implement it in IE after all).

[besson3c]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

An end-user wouldn't on their own. But it's pretty easy to see why a web designer would want to use this (and ask visitors to install it on visiting their site), because then they wouldn't have to bend over backwards to get their site to work properly in the broken mess that is IE.

It's also an attempt to get traction for HTML 5 by working around IE. Previously, the argument's been that HTML 5 is neat, but it will never catch on because Microsoft will never support it, and thus web developers won't want to shut out most of their customers by using it. Now HTML 5 can be used despite IE, and thus, maybe it'll become prevalent (forcing MS to actually implement it in IE after all).

Exactly right.

Not only does it open up the doors to HTML 5, but also a much faster Javascript rendering engine, and an alternative to Flash in Canvas. I don't know a whole lot about Canvas yet, but somebody posted that demo just a little while ago that blew the doors off of what Flash is capable of in terms of performance, and I'm certain that working with Canvas is much less of a proprietary walled garden that Flash is.

I guess this might be partially why Adobe is working on open source Flex, but I'm far more interested in something a little less associated with Adobe and something that doesn't require their IDE to work in (although I don't know if this is true for Flex, I've been too lazy to research it much). I can see a day where our existing animation toolkits are extended to support far more sophisticated transitions that are easy to plug into. I think the most obvious starting place is something similar to the Keynote transitions in animating graphs and stuff like that, or perhaps something similar to some of the Dashboard and iPhone transitions. I recall reading about work being done to provide 3D acceleration in web browsers too.

I know that much of this is pie in the sky for right now, but a lot of this has been largely because IE has lagged its sorry ass for years and years and years and years. I hope that something like this will help make IE much less of a bottleneck.

[besson3c]

Google claims that this plugin makes IE more secure