This is entertainingly insidious. Can anyone think of similar instances where a flexible plugin/extension system was subverted to basically turn one product into a competing product?
It's entertaining but it's not insidious. It's a nice bit of additional PR for the "IE Sucks" movement, but no one will use this. The people who are using IE6, by and large, don't have the ability to install stuff on their machines. Assuming any of them know/care what browser they are running. Most of the time when I answer support emails with "What browser are you running?" the response is "I don't know-- how do I check that?".
Really? It looks like a site has to opt-in in order to use Chrome Frame, so you could almost look at it like Flash.
Consider the following scenario: YouTube releases a suite of new features, but they require some new functionality from HTML5. This is fine for Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc., but if you're using IE it'll prompt you to install Chrome Frame, just like it prompts you to install Flash. I could see it getting to the point where people instinctively do this just as they do with Flash.
Hell, maybe it could even be used to subvert Flash itself. Suddenly IE users everywhere are viewing <video>-based YouTube videos.
Most sites that have Gears support don't force the user to install Gears to use the site. There is no pop-up telling the users that they should get Gears to run the site - Google docs just has a nice little link at the top that says "Offline". There is no impetus to click it, and I bet many users don't even realize this feature exists. When the plug-in becomes required to use a site, and the user is presented with a pop-up telling him so, I think that changes things quite a bit.
Yes, but you realize that this is a self defeating argument, right? People who aren't using IE had to install the plugin themselves. Doesn't impact people who do use IE, the target market for this Google plugin.
I did recognize the irony: users who've installed browsers have needed to install plugins, users who haven't installed browsers haven't needed to install plugins.
The extremely wide spread of IE toolbars and other ActiveX plugins shows that Google will garner installs. They'll probably also have the OEMs they're paying to bundle Chrome install Chrome Frame too.
Hell, they might even stuff it into the Google Toolbar for IE -- which has tens of millions of mostly paid-for installs.
Gears didn't provide users anything special, that's why it never caught on. But in this case, it provides users with a better web browsing experience. Our site doesn't support IE6 at all, in fact we just send those users to a web page saying that we'll support you guys in the "near" future. We could use their meta tag if the users are using IE6 and prompt them to install the Google plugin so that they could still use our website using IE6.
That's a very good point about it being bundled already. However, has Gears really been pushed that much by Google? I mean, even as an advanced user, I know that it exists and that various web apps use it, but it seems to be in the background and not all that advertised. I don't even use it myself.
I think a new browser engine offers a lot more opportunity for more tangible, up front enhancements to a user's web experience than client-side offline storage would, at least in an immediate sense.
The difference is that gears enables new uses, whereas chrome frame can be used to make existing web sites better (canvas, faster JS, full CSS) and make web development easier. It benefits far, far more people at a much lower incremental cost than gears.
But Gears had as many useful features, and it benefits people who actually care about their experience rather than people who arguably don't. Why do we believe Google's going to push this in ways they never did for Gears?
You're leaving out the fundamental detail -- Myspace was forcing upgrades to Flash 9, and the impetus was active Myspace worms that were exploiting security holes in Flash.
...don't have the ability to install stuff on their machines
But their IT departments can install it. Those IT departments usually want to upgrade because they have to write internal web apps and they feel the pain, too. But they can't upgrade due to various legacy apps that are tightly coupled to IE6. This lets them have their cake and eat it, too.
In my experience working in IT, the cost of MSIE6 is implicit and invisible and there's even some fear about security and legal problems related to free software. These companies are still targeting MSIE6 first and sometimes only in completely new applications; it's support for other browsers that is explicitly considered as an optional expense.
I agree that this won't make any difference to people who are totally clueless about browsers and browser compatibility, but extending the idea might make life easier for others; if you could run IE6 in "IE-mode" for a whitelist of sites that you knew required compatibility, "Chrome mode" for all other sites, and toggle between them on demand, wouldn't that be pretty useful? Assuming that you have any need for IE at all, of course.
Of course, when you think about that scenario, it starts to seem insidious the other way around. People might be less and less motivated to write cross-compatible websites if it becomes easier and easier to work around incompatibility.
Are all users allowed to install browser plugins? That seems like the motivation for this. Otherwise, it seems pretty useless. IE 6 is the main problem, and the problem exists due to a lack of administrator privileges.
I wouldn't consider IE6 the "main problem." In fact, IE -- at large -- or the Microsoft, IE team should be considered the main problem. Even IE8 is horribly far behind in CSS, HTML5, JS, et al implementations -- the very thing this plugin seeks to circumvent, in more than JUST IE6.
I agree with the notion that it is still useless to those IE users that don't have privileges to install addons/plugins. However, perhaps in those IT shops where administrators are required to keep around legacy browsers for legacy plugins / software, this is a attainable middle-ground for the administrators to give their users a better foot to stand on.
