Google Chrome Frame

Google just released pretty interesting plugin for Internet Explorer called Google Chrome Frame. It is aimed at IE 6, 7, and 8 users on Windows XP and Vista. These users are typically the corporate desktop users that have not upgraded because of legacy IE6 applications or lazy IT staffs or both. When users install this plugin they will have full HTML5 support in their browser while maintaining IE6 compatibility with their legacy applications.

So legacy IE users download it here:
http://www.google.com/chromeframe/eula.html

Now, designers and developers. Place this little meta tag on your page and this will enable google chrome frame for your websites and web applications.

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

If google chrome frame is there, then it will switch to the chrome webkit rendering engine. If not... it will work just like it did before. Google has also give us some handy tools to check to see if google chrome frame is installed and if not, prompt the user to download it...

<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/chrome-frame/1/CFInstall.min.js"> </script>

<div id="placeholder"</div>

<script>
CFInstall.check({
    node: "placeholder",
    destination: "http://www.waikiki.com"
  });
</script>

Check out the full developer guide:
http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html

So what does this really mean. Well, it really depends on google really. If google starts requiring HTML5 support for HQ youtube videos and some advanced features in picasa web, blogger, gmail and google docs. Then this Google Chrome Frame will be huge. But perhaps this will force microsoft to push out an update to IE6 or that offers a "legacy" mode and a modern mode. I am in favor for either one... As long as we can move these neglected users out of the dark ages of web browsing.