Google Chrome Frame

As a web designer one of my main goals is to try and make sites look and function the same across all browser platforms, whether it be Firefox, Safari, Opera or Internet Explorer. Making this happen though can sometimes be more challenging than it sounds!

Why?…I blame Internet Explorer.

Until recently, with the new release of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft never really seemed to make the effort in developing Internet Explorer so that it complied to the open web standards. “The Web Standards Project” (WaSP), which was founded in 1998,  works with web browser companies so that their browsers adhere to these web standards.

If you are a normal web surfer this may not seem an issue to you, but being a web designer you may feel differently. My experiences of designing  a websites to be compatible in Internet Explorer and all other popular browsers involves me having to insert various Internet Explorer fixes so that my site would look and function the same in Internet Explorer. I found that if I designed my site to look good and function in Firefox it would then preview in the other web browsers the same, but more than often Internet Explorer would give me a different result. This then resulted in me having to implement fixes/workarounds and in some cases even remove functional code that may reduce the impact of the site or the user experience. Microsoft Internet Explorer still have a strong percentage in the market and you really cannot ignore the importance of your site displaying and functioning correctly in IE.

Well Google has the answer!…Turn Internet Explorer into Google Chrome.

Google Chrome Frame is a Internet Explorer plug-in that brings Google Chrome’s rendering engine to Internet Explorer. This not only takes advantage of Google’s fast and efficient rendering engine but also adds functional capabilities that Internet Explorer currently doesn’t support in it latest version and more importantly older versions. Users will need the plug-in installed to take advantage of it but to get it working in your sites all that is required is a simple meta tag to be put in the header code.

For more information and to install the plug-in out http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ or check out the video below.