Google Has A Solution For Internet Explorer: Turn It Into Chrome
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
The anti-IE6 campaign reached a boil this summer with Mashable's call for IE6 to die, but the sticking point was never sentiment — it was the offices where IT departments block upgrades and leave workers stranded on a nine-year-old browser. Google had already entered the browser race with its own client in 2008 (first test of Google's new browser), yet a standalone download could not reach machines whose users aren't allowed to install one.
With the Chrome Frame plug-in, announced on the Chromium Blog and picked up the same day by ReadWriteWeb, Google sidesteps that lock by injecting Chrome's engine inside Internet Explorer itself — and the timing points at Google Wave, which Mashable framed as the real IE killer and which the Google Wave Developer Blog confirmed will run in IE through the frame. The story travelled widely across outlets within a day, a sign of how much pent-up demand there was to retire IE6.
First-order effects
- Users trapped on IE6 by workplace policies get an installable path to modern web rendering — HTML5-capable pages like Google Wave work inside their existing IE shell without an official browser upgrade.
- Microsoft loses control of the rendering layer on its own installed base: the engine behind IE can now be swapped out by a third-party plug-in, page by page.
Second-order effects
- Corporate IT departments face a new enforcement problem — a plug-in that quietly upgrades the browsing experience their lockdown rules were designed to freeze, forcing policy decisions between blocking Chrome Frame and tolerating it.
- Web developers gain leverage to drop IE6-specific fallbacks, since the audience 'stuck on IE6' shrinks to those who decline or are denied the plug-in rather than everyone on the legacy browser.
Third-order effects
- If plug-ins can swap rendering engines inside the incumbent browser, competition shifts from winning the browser install to controlling the engine underneath any shell — a structural threat to whoever owns the default.
- Enterprise browser policy becomes a battleground between vendor-dictated standards and worker-side workarounds, with Google positioned to route around IT gatekeeping at scale.
The trend: The browser war is moving from shipping rival standalone clients to injecting rival engines inside the incumbent's own shell, with application lock-in (Wave) doing the persuading that downloads couldn't.