The communications platform won't support any version of Internet Explorer

Sep 23, 2009 07:54 GMT  ·  By

Google just launched a new plugin allowing Chrome to run inside Internet Explorer. This opens up a lot of possibilities but it's unlikely a lot of users will install it by themselves and, even if they do, web developers need to support it as well. So Google took the first step, and a rather bold one at that, by requiring users who want to test Google Wave, which is seeing a wider release next week, in IE to install the Chrome Frame or use another browser. To put it another way, Google Wave won't support any version of Internet Explorer.

“When we extend our Google Wave preview next week, we will encourage users of Internet Explorer to install Google Chrome Frame, an open source plug-in that brings HTML5 and other open web technologies to Internet Explorer,” Lars Rasmussen, Google Wave team manager and creator, and Adam Schuck, Google Wave client tech lead, wrote. “Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance.”

When they will log into Google Wave, Internet Explorer users will be greeted with a message asking them to install the Chrome Frame if they want to run Google's latest communications revolution. The search giant says that the reason for this is that Wave makes extensive use of relatively new web features, like the ones in HTML 5, and that developers used to spend too much time making it work for IE users, time that could be spent working on new features for all users.

By using the Chrome Frame, Wave developers can create just one version of the software guaranteed to work for all users. That's the official version anyway. But, while the reasons Google listed are perfectively legitimate, there's another, more subversive motivation behind the move. By requiring users to install the plugin it may pave the way for them to move completely to Google Chrome at some point especially if more and more web developers adopt the feature, as the search giant hopes.