Chrome Plus: Putting the plug-in shoe on the other foot

I’m watching with amusement the whole Google Frame controversy. As a huge Chrome fan, I’ve found the sight of Microsoft squirming in the face of this unexpected assault from within quite entertaining. Everyone knows that Internet Explorer is on its last legs — the only people still using it are either too ignorant to know better (the mom-and-pop crowd) or, worse still, forced to do so by outdated corporate IT policies or legacy application compatibility requirements.

So it comes as no surprise that Microsoft is genuinely worried by Google’s Frame project. Every inch of Web standards real estate Microsoft cedes to its archenemy Google pushes it that much closer to the cliff. One more faux pas — for example, a zero-day exploit of some unpatched cross-site scripting vector in a legacy version of the browser engine — and it’s over the edge for IE.

But the real irony behind all of this plug-in angst is that, when it comes to overriding a browser’s default rendering behavior, the folks from Microsoft actually struck the first blow. Or, more accurately, their hard work was indirectly leveraged by a group of open source developers to create something similar to Google’s Frame, only with the reverse goal in mind: creating an IE browser engine plug-in for Google Chrome.

I’m speaking, of course, of Chrome Plus. One of the more innovative of the Chromium-based derivatives, Chrome Plus provides a full-blown Google Chrome 4.xx (currently 4.0.206.0) browser experience with a twist: the capability to open a new tab that uses the IE Trident browser engine in place of Chrome’s normal WebKit engine.

The first question that usually comes to mind is: Why do such a thing? Why tarnish Chrome’s sleek, powerful image by gumming it all up with a bunch of legacy IE code?

The answer, of course, is that — despite our earnest prayers — IE remains a dominating factor in Web site compatibility. Use one too many fancy new tags or pile on one too many clever CSS layers and kapow! Your site blows up under creaky old IE6.

As a Web developer, the reality of dealing with this legacy compatibility monkey means constantly switching between browsers to verify that what looks great in Chrome (or Safari or any other WebKit implementation) also renders correctly on the notoriously quirky Trident engine. But with Chrome Plus, access to the locally installed IE page renderer (it uses whatever version is in place on the system) is just a mouse click away.

In fact, you don’t even have to retype the URL — there’s an Open This in IE Mode link right in the address bar. I found this feature to be particularly handy earlier today. I was booking some free plane tickets through Emirates Airlines’ Skywards frequent flyer site, and no matter how many times I reloaded the home page, I couldn’t get the site’s menu system to render in any usable fashion. However, when I clicked the IE Mode button, the site opened up in a new, IE-driven tab that rendered the balky menus flawlessly.

Will Google be rolling IE Mode into the base Chrome product? Unlikely. Why prop up IE by indirectly supporting it alongside Chrome’s own, vastly superior engine when your real goal is to kill it off for good?

But even if it never gains mainstream status, this by-product of the Chromium project does provide us with an interesting glimpse of what a Google Frame implementation might look like — if the shoe were on the other foot.