Google retires Chrome Frame
Google announced today that it made the decision to retire - yet another - product, this time Chrome Frame. According to the Chromium blog, the company will stop supporting and updating the product from January 2014 on.
Chrome Frame is a free plug-in for Microsoft's Internet Explorer that adds an option to use Google Chrome as the rendering engine of choice in the browser for select websites.
Webmasters had options to add a meta tag to their sites to allow the use of the plug-in on their website.
Chrome Frame has been an ideal solution for situations where Internet Explorer is needed to access legacy applications, but where the installed version of the browser lacks support for newer web technologies so that certain web sites cannot be accessed at all, or slower than in modern browsers.
Google bases the decision on the fact that the majority of Internet users are using modern browsers today that support new web technologies such as HTML5 or CSS3.
It is also a fact that the use of legacy browsers has declined in recent time with newer modern browsers taking up their place.
Please note that existing Chrome Frame installations will continue to work after January 2014 but that Google won't support or update the plugin anymore. It is therefore theoretically possible to continue using it, at least for the foreseeable future.
Google suggests in the announcement that IT administrators give their users access to a modern browser - read Chrome - even though it is clear that this is often not an option.
To achieve this, Google recommends the use of Legacy Browser Support, a browser extension for Chrome that enables users to switch from Chrome to another installed browser on the system.
You find additional information about the decision, and consequences, on the Chrome Frame FAQ page.
Have you been making use of the feature on your system or at work? If so, what is your take on the decision?
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Didn’t use it. Unmoved by retirement.
Nothing can fix IE, and I think that this product had no sense.
The best Google could do is to retire Chrome itself as well since it is incompatible with online privacy and security and is the worst browser ever.
This is too bad I often have clients in things like finance where there existing applications that they cannot live without will only work in IE8. ChromeFrame seemed to work without interrupting their existing applications and the browser was a LOT faster for it. Makes me look like a king. This doesn’t mean death for the plugin though it just means they won’t continue updating it. I’ll probably continue to use it for every IE8 only situation I run into.
i wonder when google will retire google search? it would be no more dumb than anything else they’ve retired.