I am a Web Designer

I’ve now had a chance to take a look at Google’s new Chrome Frame. The idea of ‘frame‘ is to allow IE6 and IE7 to render web pages accurately by loading them into a Google Chrome (Webkit) iframe. Had this been a seamless integration, then I would have though it a very good and very welcome development. However, in order to get google chrome frame to be active, firstly an end user using IE6 must download an installer and install a browser plugin. Secondly, a web developer must add a google chrome frame met tag to their HTML head.

Ok, many web developers might be prepared to revisit old sites and add in this meta tag and conceivably might not find it too much of a hardship adding it to current developments. Web designers and developer are after all, conscientious souls who would like to see the web ‘just work’ for everyone, irrespective of browser.

The biggest flaw in Google’s master pan here is IE6 users. These are people who either don’t upgrade or install anything ever, or institutions, which have such a complex or large framework (like being stuck a win2000 server) that makes it impractical or too expensive to upgrade – and given that their system works just fine with IE6, their argument would be why upgrade?

If these institutions were to be so bothered about their staff using the web that they would use valuable resources to install this Chrome frame plugin, then they’d be as well to simply install Firefox and have a secure web browser that renders sites as they should be. An IE6 plugin can be installed in Firefox for intranet sites that require it and would make much better sense than adding a new plugin to an old un-secure browser when there’s a perfect opportunity to add a legacy plugin to a modern, secure one.

It’ll be interesting to see how Chrome Frame develops from here, but I found it perplexing that google would have devoted such resources to such a non-problem.

Further reading: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html , http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2009/09/28/google-chrome-frame-technical-details/