Run Google Chrome in Internet Explorer?

Through the magic of browser augmentation, you can now run a good WebKit browser from within your copy of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Some notes for those of you scoring this one at home:

• Internet Explorer is far and away the internet’s most used Web browser.


• Internet Explorer 6 was born in August of 2001, and last updated in April of 2008.


• For many years, IE6’s share was something around ninety percent of the market.


• Internet Explorer 6 does not understand HTML5 tagging.


• Internet Explorer 6 features old-style (slow) JavaScript performance.


• The Web community has been asking for a better browser since long before IE6 showed up, and many responded by drifting away to Firefox, Safari and the Google Chrome browsers.


• Some IT departments thought it was cute to tie Web applications not to the underlying standard technologies of the Web, the HTML, the CSS and the JavaScript, but to the underlying technologies of Internet Explorer, including ActiveX, despite the security risks involved.

That’s pretty much it, for Internet Explorer and especially Internet Explorer 6. Comes now the Google Chrome plug-in, which shines up IE in ways that Microsoft couldn’t, or wouldn’t, for all of those years.

Google Chrome Frame is an open-sourced Google plug-in featuring one-click installation that brings Internet Explorer up to par with other WebKit browsers. You can use it with IE6 if you have to, IE7 if you’re still using that, or IE8, and take advantage of JavaScript improvement approaching ten times better JavaScript performance, plus new support for HTML5. All of your old IE applications still work, because you are still using IE.

This comes to you from your friends at Google, remember. Not your... developers, at Microsoft. Take a deep breath, here, kids. Chrome now runs inside Internet Explorer. Just imagine if you could get Honda or Toyota quality and performance in a new Pontia—uh, Satur—uh, Buick. To all outward appearances, you’re a Good American, buying a Good American Car. But now it runs forever and doesn’t fall apart on you and doesn’t depreciate as fast. This is going to be an interesting ride, folks. Google does not destroy anything about IE6, IE7 or IE8. It does not change the browser in ways that it identifies as Google Chrome on server logs. It adds functionality to IE, just like any other plug-in.

Web developers cannot afford to ignore Internet Explorer, it’s just too big. But this new plug-in allows authors to include a single line of markup in their pages that flips the rendering of a page from Internet Explorer’s “Trident” engine to the increasingly-popular WebKit engine. Suddenly, HTML5 works, and JavaScript works much faster.

Now, quite often in life when you mix manufacturers, authors, artists, if you will, you run into troubles. The whole car is English but the engine is now Metric. That doesn’t seem to be the case in Google Chrome Frame. Internet Explorer now runs the ACID-3 test and scores… 100 out of 100. It’s amazing.

Now Microsoft, predictably, doesn’t think much of this idea. They remind people that now, you have two lines of vulnerability online, the bag of IE problems and the bag of Chome’s troubles, too. That’s certainly valid, but I suspect that Google is going to be doing whatever it can to shine up Chrome Frame.