Google brings HTML5 to older versions of IE

 

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By Nicole Kobie

Posted on 23 Sep 2010 at 08:49

Google has taken Chrome Frame out of beta, releasing the first version of the rendering plugin.

The Frame plugin uses Chrome's WebKit rendering engine to display webpages inside older versions of Internet Explorer, bringing HTML5 to the 16% of web users still using IE6 and those stuck on Windows XP, which doesn't support Microsoft's latest IE9 browser.

"This stable channel release provides our most polished version of Google Chrome Frame to date, allowing users to access modern web technologies like HTML5 on legacy browsers," said software engineers Tomas Gunnarsson and Robert Shield in a post on the Chromium blog.

"After months of polishing, Google Chrome Frame now starts three times faster on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and the most common conflicts with other plug-ins have been fixed," they added.

Now that it's been released, Frame will be updated on the same cycle as Chrome, about once every six weeks. "We’ve set aggressive goals for future releases: we’re working on making start-up speed even faster and removing the current requirement for administrator rights to install the plug-in," the Google pair added.

For Frame to work, web developers need to put a line of code on their sites. Google said its own applications, including Docs and YouTube, have started to add support for Frame, with support for Gmail and Google Calendar in the works.

Anyone currently using the beta will be automatically updated to the final version in the next few days, or Chrome Frame can be downloaded here. Google has also created an installer to help admins deploy Frame across networks.