Google Chrome Frame

~ the obit ~

Chrome Frame's years line up exactly with my working life and I never installed it once, because it was never aimed at anyone who could pick their own browser. It was aimed at the machines that could not be changed. The office desktop under a group policy, the internal application written against Internet Explorer 6 in 2003 that nobody was ever going to rewrite.

Google announced it on 22 September 2009. You installed a plugin into Internet Explorer 6, 7 or 8, and later 9, and from then on any page that asked for it was rendered by Chrome's WebKit layout engine and V8 JavaScript engine instead of the one Microsoft shipped. The window around it still looked like Internet Explorer, down to the menus and the icon in the taskbar. Only the part that actually drew the page had been replaced.

The opt-in was a single line in the page header, a meta tag saying chrome=1, so the site decided rather than the user. That inversion is the interesting bit. Every other answer to the IE6 problem asked hundreds of millions of people to install a different browser. This one asked a web developer to add one tag, then quietly did the work on any machine where somebody had gotten the plugin past the IT department.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what microsoft said about it ~

Microsoft's response was that Chrome Frame made Internet Explorer less safe, doubling the surface available to malware and muddling what users understood about web security. There was a real argument in there, since two rendering engines in one process is genuinely more code to attack, and there was also the obvious fact that a competitor had just parked its engine inside Microsoft's product without asking.

Google kept shipping. Google Wave needed Chrome Frame to run in Internet Explorer at all, and Google Apps eventually pointed IE users at it rather than supporting old versions properly. In August 2011 a version arrived that installed without administrator rights, which was aimed squarely at the locked-down corporate desktop where the whole problem lived.

~ the retirement ~

On 13 June 2013 the Chromium blog posted that Chrome Frame was being retired, with support and updates ending in January 2014. The reasoning was that the old browsers it existed for had finally fallen far enough that keeping a second rendering engine alive inside them was not worth the maintenance. The last build went out and the plugin was discontinued on 25 February 2014.

It did not lose. The thing it was built to route around simply died on its own, which is the rarer way for a workaround to end. By 2014 Chrome was the browser people installed on purpose, and a plugin whose entire job was making Internet Explorer 6 usable had run out of Internet Explorer 6.

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