When Google releases its Google Wave later this year they will face the adoption challenge. As you may know Wave heavily relies on a subset of HTML 5, which IE seems to happily ignore. It’s not just HTML5 though, according to the ACID3 test IE is known to be the least standard-compliant browser out there! Now, how does Google plan on getting the Wave to work in IE — still the most popular browser? I assume Microsoft won’t help Google push its Wave by fixing its browser!?
Once again, Google genii came up with a unique trick. No need to push IE users to switch to Chrome. No need to bitch about lack of standards support in IE.
When IE user comes to the Wave website, he’ll see a message saying something like “using Wave in IE requires Google Chrome plug-in”. Arguably that is much less scary than completely switching to another browser. Most users know what plugins are, after all everybody uses Flash. Moreover, this plugin is from Google, a solid respectable firm, well-known for non-intrusiveness and lightweightness of its solutions.
Once the plug-in is installed, it will look for the following tag on the page:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
If the tag is present, the page will be rendered by the Chrome plug-in with IE only providing the frame and the menus (which is what users are attached to). I can imagine other major and minor sites taking advantage of this, mostly for the sake of HTML5 support but also to take advantage of faster JavaScript and to save time ironing out IE-specific rendering glitches.
You can get the plug-in here: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ and technical details here: http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/developers_guide.html
At this point the plug-in still does not support printing nor downloads, something I’m sure Google can fix by Christmass.
