Google plans to drag Internet Explorer into the world of modern Web browsing with a new open source plugin that will inject Chrome’s renderer and JavaScript engine into Microsoft’s browser.
A number of modern Web features cannot be used pervasively on the Internet because Microsoft’s dominant browser, Internet Explorer, often fails to support current and emerging standards. Google has a plan to drag IE into the world of modern browsing by building a plugin that will allow it to use Chrome’s HTML renderer and high-performance JavaScript engine.
Microsoft has recently taken promising steps forward by engaging with the standards community and adding much-needed features in Internet Explorer 8. Although this demonstrates a willingness to improve, it doesn’t change the fact that Microsoft is still lagging far behind other browser vendors. Perhaps more troubling than the deficiencies of IE8 is the tragic longevity of IE6, which was released in 2001 and is long overdue for retirement. Some companies unfortunately cannot give it up, either, because they depend on proprietary Web software that only supports legacy versions of IE.
Google hopes that delivering Chrome’s rendering engine in an IE plugin will provide a pragmatic compromise for users who can’t upgrade. Web developers will be able to use an X-UA-Compatible meta tag to specify that their page should be displayed with the Chrome renderer plugin instead of using Internet Explorer’s Trident engine. This approach will ensure that the Chrome engine is only used when it is supposed to and that it won’t disrupt the browser’s handling of legacy Web applications that require IE6 compatibility.
