Make IE awesome by turning it into Google Chrome
As I’m sure you all know by now Google made an announcement about their Chrome Frame plugin for IE that turns the Trident rendering engine into the Chrome rendering engine giving IE access to the awesome power that is Chrome. No longer will IE miss out on those awesome new features in CSS3 & HTML5 the more competent browsers enjoy today such as the soon to be released Google Wave.
I did a post a while back on how Google Chrome is changing the browser, the landscape is rapidly progressing thanks to Google and the likes of Mozilla, Webkit & Opera. This plugin helps push that final frontier into fruition bringing the next set of tools to all major browsers.
This demo was slightly modified from the awesome work of http://iterationsix.com/posts/16 particle fountain.
How does it work?
The above demo uses the HTML5 canvas tag to simulate particle effects. If you load this in IE you will be prompted to install Chrome Frame. Setting up a site to make it render using Chrome Frame is a simple meta tag.
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">Look familiar? It’s the same meta tag that IE uses to force IE8 to render in compatibility mode.
If IE goes to a site that has this meta tag it will kick-in and render the page using Chrome Frame giving the full power of Google Chrome in IE. Pretty simple and incredibly powerful.
IE8 vs IE8 with cf: protocol to force use of Chrome Frame
Prompt the user to install Chrome Frame
What if the user doesn’t know about or have the Chrome Frame installed on their machine? There’s a solution for that. Using a script available on Google Ajax APIs
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/chrome-frame/1/CFInstall.min.js"> </script> <script type="text/javascript"> CFInstall.check(); </script>
The above code will check if Chrome Frame is installed if not it will prompt the user to install it by loading up an iframe with the Chrome Frame site. The check method gives you quite a few options all of them are optional the previous link gives a good run down of all the options and what they do.
Force it
If your are keen to use it before sites start adding the meta tag you can force the site to render using Chrome Frame by appending the cf: protocol to the beginning of any url e.g. cf:http://bespin.mozilla.com/ if loaded in IE with Chrome Frame installed it will force the website to render using the Chrome engine.
Early stages
Right now this plugin is in early development stages but I’m sure it will move along rapidly to coincide with Google Wave public release.
This is truly an exciting plugin that opens the flood gates to a massive user base being able to use the latest and greatest web apps.
Post filed under: html5, javascript.
Hey, I did a canvas particle demo too, also partially inspired by the work at Iteration Six. I’m getting a much higher framerate than you’ve got going on in Firefox. One thing I found is that you should make the bounding box around the gradients as small as possible, which vastly improves the number of particles that can be rendered at once. The code is pretty clean, so you should be able to follow it.
My demo is here:
Jon Neal, October 7th, 2009http://www.ferretarmy.com/files/canvas/fullScreenCanvas/fullScreenCanvas.html
Thanks for the tip Jon. I just quickly put the demo together to show Chrome Frame more than anything wasn’t too concerned about optimising for other browsers.
The Css Ninja, October 7th, 2009Chrome Frame is a nice gesture, but unfortunately Google is missing the point here. Why would anyone ever install Chrome Frame? If someone doesn’t like IE, isn’t it far more likely he’d switch browsers? Why not just install Chrome entirely?
Mathias Bynens, December 2nd, 2009If people want to switch, they’ll just do it. Unless they can’t, due to their company’s infrastructure for example. But in that case, they won’t be able to install Chrome Frame either…
Some valid points, but I still think Chrome Frame is very viable.
Most average users don’t even know what a browser is let alone there are other options out there. All they know is the E with the swish lets them get to google/facebook/ebay. What Google is doing is enabling IE, which the average computer user is comfortable using, and giving them a much richer experience without the hassle of learning a new browser (which is daunting concept for the non computer savvy).
As for the infrastructure issue, the IT department is a whole lot more likely to install a plugin for a user than install a whole new browser. Thus avoiding any compatibility issues that will arise if they were to roll out a new browser across the company.
If a whole company is stuck on IE6 for compatibility reasons and they decide to roll out chrome frame to all users. That’s a win for the open web in my books.
The Css Ninja, December 3rd, 2009