The Story
If I didn’t know better, I’d think this was a Photoshop job. But no, this is a screenshot I took on my computer after installing Chrome Frame, a plugin developed by Google which essentially lets you have Chrome in Internet Explorer. And unlike most similar plugins which would put your machine in a position of running two browsers, Chrome Frame doesn’t take up too much by way of system resources.
As for marketing Chrome Frame, Google apparently isn’t going to do much. Aside from hearing about it from tech resources like TechGeist, the only way people will find out about the plugin is if they’re running Google web applications in Internet Explorer. When that happens, Google might display a little notification saying “Hey, your browser is slow. Try this.”
I Love It!
This might be the best thing to ever happen. There are still a lot of sites which only play nice with Internet Explorer or which don’t support Chrome. One of my personal favorite is Netflix’s instant streaming. Now all of the Chromepuffs of the world (yes, that’s the term for Chrome fans) can have the feel of Chrome inside a more supported browser.
With Chrome Frame, there’s now some temptation to use IE for blogging. Before you throw a full wine bottle through your computer screen, here me out. With the release of Chrome 3, Google patched some bugs, but it introduced a nifty new one. Namely, if I leave Wordpress open for too long, all of the buttons on my page become inactive. I have to cut and paste my work into a new tab. That’s awful, so I switched to Firefox. But after using Chrome, Firefox feels really slow. I’ve started to notice the lag between typing a character and the time it takes to render on screen. It’s not much, but it gets to me. In a Chrome Frame-equipped IE install, I get all my speed without the bugs. It’s sexy. Hopefully Chrome one day won’t be riddled with all sorts of problems, but until then, Chrome Frame might be an actual alternative. That is, if you can get the taste of Internet Explorer out of your mouth.
