Wednesday, September 23, 2009

First look at Google Chrome's Frame

Are you willing to use Google chrome you don't have privileges to install the new browser. There might be the IT department which may block installing new applications. You might be a SharePoint guy using IE heavily for development related works and also using Google apps like Gmail, Google reader etc for personal things Are you one of them. Google comes up with Chrome Frame

There's a way to leverage Chrome's state-of-the art rendering engine within Internet explorer without installing Google Chrome. Again Google leverages the existing capability to give more comfort to its users just like what happened for XmlHttp object.

Google developed a IE plugin/addon to replace Microsoft's traditional Trident layout engine with Chrome's layout engine based upon Webkit. You can call this Chrome layout by adding the prefix of cf: before any url. For eg:- Google home page will be cf:http://www.google.co.in/

So as a web developer do you want to use the feature of Chrome which is not present in IE(for eg Canvas tags). You just need to add the following meta tag to you code

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

Google provides a Javascript code snippet to detect whether Chrome frame exists or not,if not then it will prompt the users to install the plugin

Google's Search home page in Frame

Google Frame's About page


This Frame project is still in its early stages so expect some buggy things too. Let's see how Microsoft handles this plugin in future.

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