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People hate IE6; they’ve made that abundantly clear on the web. Unfortunately, plenty of people are still stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So Google is doing something about it.

Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. LOL… seriously: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome.

It’s freakin hilarious that Google seems to hates IE so much that it has spent its own time “improving it”. You could also read that as “spent it’s own time to destroy it”.  Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, say that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. RIGHT… whatever… if it helps kill IE6 off the web I’m all for it.

So what is this thing? It’s just a plug-in that creates a new frame inside of IE that IS the Chrome browser. The plug-in itself is only about 500K, but then it must download around 10 MB of Chrome-related data to work correctly on a machine (I assume a one time download). The look will be so seamless that a user shouldn’t realize they’re not simply browsing with their regular old version of IE… except that it’ll be hell-a-faster and standards compliant.

To target the Chrome plug-in for IE, developers simply have to insert a meta tag in their HTML code. If Chrome Frame isn’t found, the page will render just as it normally would in IE.

Chrome Frame will work with IE6, IE7, and IE8 on any Windows-based machine.

So this is obviously wicked cool, and Microsoft’s response should be just as cool as well!!!!

You can find Google Chrome Frame here. And learn more in the video below.

Ben Firshman has ported the vNES into Javascript. Seriously… in JavaScript. While that’s pretty cool itself what it really shows is the blinding fast speed at which Google Chrome can handle JavaScript. In Google Chrome you get Full speed, 60 FPS emulation. Firefox… about 10 FPS. Now you can goof off with some cool old school NES games right from your browser… as long as your browser is Chrome (COMEON GOOGLE… GET EXTENSIONS IN THERE SO I CAN SWITCH!)

http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/

Mashable does a great writeup on why IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On. The serious downsides to IE6 are:

- CSS v2 (Cascading Style Sheets): This is the code that enables almost all design on the web. In other words, designers have to hack up websites just to make them load in IE6.

- PNG Transparency: A great deal of .png images don’t display correctly in IE6. It basically kills using them in design work.

- General Security: Just like not updating your virus software can get you riddled with spyware, not updating your browser can be a gateway to attacks. There are even code snippets that will shut down IE6. I won’t tell you what they are, but you can find them on Wikipedia. It’s unstable.

- Digg , Facebook , and YouTube (soon): Both Digg and YouTube have announced that they’re cutting back on IE6 support. Facebook already gives you suggestions for better browsers if you try to log in with IE6. You won’t be able to Digg articles or browse YouTube via IE6 in the near future.

You should read through the entire article though if this is something that is of interest to you because they go into HTML5 as well as how IE6 is hurting web development progression in general. As a “web guy” I can’t wait for IE6 to die. When a client says they want to target IE6 (I usually say “current release + one version back” but sometimes they object) I utterly cringe because I know what a PITA it will be.

Catch the full article on Mashable.

Supposedly, a Google representative demonstrated a private beta build of the OS to an anonymous Acer parts supplier yesterday. The pictures were grabbed while the Google rep wasn’t  looking. Here’s the highlights:

• The “elegant” install on the Acer Extensa 4620Z laptop took about 10 minutes and 1 restart
• Reboots desktop-to-desktop in about 25 seconds
• It was “amazingly fast” in its stripped-down beta form
• The blue orb on the auto-hiding “Chrome Bar” along the bottom of the UI is essentially the start menu
• Navigating the file system can be done in “exploration” (like Windows explorer) or “browser” (search based) modes
• The Chrome Bar can also host a search bar if configured
• Future Chrome OS netbooks will feature an iconified Chrome key on the keyboard similar to the Windows flag key

Source: http://chromeosleak.wordpress.com/

Rumors spread yesterday about how Google was going to make a “Chrome Operating System”. Of course there have been rumors of a Google OS for years now. In early 2006, Ars reported on Google’s denial that it was prepping an OS distribution of its own based on Ubuntu. More recently, the (relative) ease of porting Android to netbooks led to plenty of speculation that Google’s full computer OS, when it appeared, would be based on Android. It turns out that’s not the case… it’s NOT going to be Android (though Google won’t preclude third-party adopters from using Android).

Last night at 9:00pm Google’s official blog raised the flag indicating Google was getting into the OS race. So what is the OS? It’s being Google Chrome OS and the operating system will center on Google Chrome and be targeted for netbooks (initially). It will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. While speculation was wild a few days ago about a Chrome OS, what wasn’t understood was how Chrome, a browser, could BE an OS…. a browser isn’t actually an operating system, what about hardware drivers, memory and processor management, and other red herrings. It turns out Google is cranking out a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel – welp, that solves issues about drivers and such.

So what’s the intention here? Google intends that the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using existing web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform. If you do a lot in the cloud now then as TechCrunch put it “Don’t worry about those desktop apps you think you need. Office? Meh. You’ve got Zoho and Google Apps. You won’t miss office. Chrome plus Gears plus Google Wave plus HTML 5 and web platforms like Flash and Silverlight all combine into a single wonderful computing device. The Internet Is Everything. All the OS has to do is boot the damn computer, get me to a browser as fast as possible and then stay the hell out of the way.”

The timing of this couldn’t be any more bitter sweet for Microsoft. Windows 7 RTM lands next week with the full release for October. I have to wonder if Google was trying to take a bit of wind out of Microsoft’s sails since on of the things touted was how well Windows 7 runs on netbooks. The Google Chrome OS will only become available for consumers in the second half of 2010 – not that far behind the release of Windows 7.

Does this spell the end of Microsoft Windows? I’d say don’t count them out yet. Chrome OS will be new and will essentially require cloud computing. Sure, for most things I could get by on that, and as the web gets faster, HTML 5 hits, etc we will be able to do more and more in the cloud. In addition to the Microsoft has been developing “Gazelle” as an alternative to Internet Explorer. The browser acts like a self-contained operating system (sounds like Chrome OS) and is designed to address the fact that browsers like IE and Chrome have not been built by design to handle multiple processes and web applications in a secure manner. The browser relies on a “browser kernel” (5,000 lines of C# code) that helps enforce security rules to prevent malicious access to the PC’s underlying operating system. Built by the Microsoft Research team, company officials have been dropping hints that they are ready to talk more about Gazelle recently – perhaps as the Worldwide Developers Conference.

Google’s official blog post on Google Chrome OS