Chrome Frame

There has been a lot of talk lately about Chrome Frame, an Inter­net Explorer plu­gin from Google that makes it pos­si­ble to run web­pages in IE using Google Chrome’s ren­der­ing engine. It works by look­ing for a meta tag in the HTML of the web­page that tells the plu­gin to switch IE’s ren­der­ing engine. Hypo­thet­i­cally this is sup­posed to make it pos­si­ble for devel­op­ers to code for the Gecko and WebKit ren­der­ing engines, and ignore Inter­net Explorer altogether.

In prac­tice, I’ve found this (unfor­tu­nately) to not be the case. I’ve tried Chrome Frame on sev­eral of my web­sites, includ­ing the Fake Name Gen­er­a­tor, and have found that they look good in IE8 and Google Chrome, but not IE8 with Chrome Frame.

In addi­tion to things look­ing weird with Chrome Frame, there is also a very notice­able lag when load­ing pages that uti­lize the WebKit ren­der­ing engine. My guess is this delay is added because IE has to switch ren­der­ing engines and isn’t some­thing inher­ently wrong with WebKit, but nev­er­the­less it makes for an unpleas­ant brows­ing experience.

I think Google’s YouTube team’s idea is bet­ter: tell peo­ple with crappy browsers to upgrade if they want to take full advan­tage of a site’s features.