Undisciplined Bytes » plugin http://www.undisciplinedbytes.com Web Application Development Tips, Tricks and Techniques Tue, 31 Jan 2012 09:07:24 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 en hourly 1 Tired of IE’s issues? Turn it into Google Chrome http://www.undisciplinedbytes.com/2009/10/tired-of-ies-issues-turn-it-into-google-chrome/ http://www.undisciplinedbytes.com/2009/10/tired-of-ies-issues-turn-it-into-google-chrome/#comments Thu, 08 Oct 2009 22:17:42 +0000 Oliver Mezquita http://www.undisciplinedbytes.com/?p=14 As web programmers, we’ve all dealed with IE’s incompatibility issues and its sluggishness, and I can assure that 99% of all of us are tired of how stubborn Microsoft is about not implementing web standards and trying to enforce its own private ways of doing things (although with the release of Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft has showed a bit of effort in trying to be more standards compliant). How much time have we wasted on writing workarounds for IE for code that works seamlessly in other browsers?

Well, Google seems to be worried about this as well, and now gives us one more possibility to solve the problem: turn Internet Explorer into Google Chrome.

Google just released its new plugin for IE: Google Chrome Frame. This plugin substitutes the HTML and Javascript engines from IE with the ones from Google Chrome. This way we’ll be able to enjoy Chrome’s speed and compatibility.

I was surprised when I tried: it is exactly as having the Google Chrome browser inside IE. You can tell no difference between the real Google Chrome browser and the plugin installed in Microsoft’s browser.

Now, this plugin doesn’t fully replace IE’s HTML and Javascript engines: it just sits there waiting to be called, which can be done in two ways.

The user can decide which pages he/she wants displayed by Chrome Frame by inserting cf: right before of the URL address. This is, if you type  http://www.undisciplinedbytes.com in IE’s address bar, it will be displayed normall, as always. But if you write cf:http://www.undisciplinedbytes.com, then Chrome Frame will be in charge of rendering the page to you.

Besides, a web developer might want to force a web page to be displayed using this plugin, as long as it is installed on the client’s computer. If you add this tag to the HEAD section of a web page, Chrome Frame will be activated:

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

If Chrome Frame is installed, it will recognize this tag and realize it’s being requested to start working. If it is not installed, other browsers will just ignore the tag and behave as if it wasn’t there.

Furthermore, the plugin extends the User Agent string with the keyword chromeframe. This means that we as web developers will be able to figure out whether Chrome Frame is installed or not, and take different actions in different situations.

This is the official web page of the project.

Noble intentions Google has, no doubt about it. Great way of solving the limitations of legacy browsers and improving the usability of the web.

However, as good as all this sounds, we do have to be careful when using this plugin. We need to realize that there are many web applications that have been developed with IE in mind, or even straight targetting Microsoft’s browser. This means that we need to activate Chrome Frame only on those pages that we have previously tested that work fine in Google Chrome. We cannot just put the meta tag in all of our web pages and forget about everything else!

Related posts:

  1. Browser comparisons

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