Developer(s) | Google Inc. |
---|---|
Initial release | September 22, 2009 |
Last release | 32.0.1700.76 (January 14, 2014 | )
Preview release | 31.0.1650.48 (November 6, 2013 | )
Development status | Discontinued |
Operating system | Microsoft Windows |
Engine | WebKit (based on KHTML) |
Type | Replacement layout engine |
Website | www |
Google Chrome Frame was a plug-in designed for Internet Explorer based on the open-source Chromium project. It went stable in September 2010, on the first birthday of the project. It was discontinued in February 2014 and is no longer supported.
The plug-in works with Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8 and 9. It allows suitably coded web pages to be displayed in Internet Explorer by Google Chrome’s versions of the WebKit layout engine and V8 JavaScript engine. In a test by ComputerWorld, JavaScript code ran 10 times faster with the plug-in on Internet Explorer 8.
Development of Google Chrome Frame was required in order for Google Wave (now Apache Wave), which requires HTML5, to function in Internet Explorer.
The first stable version supporting Non-Admin Chrome Frame was rolled out on August 30, 2011. The newer Chrome Frame installer ran at Admin level by default and fell back to Non-Admin mode if the user didn't have the necessary permissions on their machine.
Web developers can allow their websites to use the plug-in by using the following code on their web pages:
This will cause the page to render in Chrome Frame for users who have it installed, without changing it for users who have not.
In February 2010, Google Chrome Frame was updated to also support deployment by HTTP headers, with a number of advantages, such as simplified sitewide support and support of the application/xhtml+xml MIME type even on Internet Explorer which normally does not support this MIME type for XHTML documents. For a blanket rollout on an entire web site, an Apache server with mod_headers and mod_setenvif enabled can specify a header directive like this: