experience matters

If you’ve attempted to use Internet Explorer to access Google Wave you have already encountered what may be one of the most interesting salvos in the renewed browser wars. Apparently frustrated by Microsoft’s ongoing lack of support for HTML 5 especially the canvas tag and compliance to Web standards generally, Google has released what it describes as an “early version” of a plug-in for Microsoft Internet Explorer. It’s called Google Chrome Frame. Google Chrome Frame literally replaces Internet Explorer’s HTML/CSS rendering and Javascript processing with Google Chrome’s WebKit-based rendering engine. WebKit is the standards-compliant guts inside Apple’s Safari, Google Chrome and about a dozen smaller and/or device-specific Web browsers.

According to Google’s Chromium Blog, implementing Web sites that use the Chrome Frame Plug-in is as simple as adding a single HTML Meta-tag: . Encouraging IE users to get the plug-in via auto detect is almost as trivial. Google provides a free-to-use Javascript that prompts IE users to get the plug-in without interfering with Firefox, Safari or Chrome users’ experience.

Given the industry-wide animosity towards IE6′s presence in lists of supported browsers, and additional costs and overhead associated with accommodating the lackluster support for current Web Standards in all versions of MSIE; it’s possible that a stable release of the Google Chrome Frame plug-in may become as common-place as Flash plug-ins in all versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer. That said, there’s no telling when a “stable” or “production-ready” version of the plug-in will be available.

Whether this compels Microsoft’s browser development teams to build support for HTML 5 features into future versions of Internet Explorer or lead to an increased share of the Browser market for Google Chrome particularly as a plug-in, remains to be seen. In either case, the future of HTML 5, canvas and Rich Internet Applications has taken a turn for the interesting. Development and creative teams are not necessarily limited to supporting the minimal list of features and functionality even if requirements to support IE6 continue for another five years, which realistically, is possible.

Written by Brendan Best.