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Google Retiring Chrome Frame
An anonymous reader writes "Google today announced it is retiring Chrome Frame, a plug-in that brings Chrome's engine to old IE versions. The company wouldn't share an exact date, but did say it will end support and cease releasing updates sometime in January 2014. Google's reasoning appears to be based on the fact that Chrome Frame was released (initially in September 2009 and then as a stable build in September 2010) at a time when old versions of Internet Explorer, which don't support the latest Web technologies, were still in very high use."
Just because you support the latest technologies doesn't mean you support them *well*.
Put a stake in IE 6's heart and be done with it. Please put it out of our misery people.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
I was seriously considering using Chrome Frame just a few months back as the means to support a very complex website based on HTML editing because IE's support is so broken so as to be almost useless. I tried very hard to support IE, but after spending a small eternity on it, I eventually gave up and declared IE unsupportable. Although I have not tried IE 10 yet, IE 9 and earlier are basically unusable in many areas, and were running at least two or three years behind where Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are in terms of robustness and feature support. Thus, all of the reasons for using Chrome Frame are still there just as much as they were four years ago, and I have zero faith in Microsoft improving that significantly at any point in the foreseeable future.
In spite of that horrible state, however, I did not bother to take the time to implement support for using and recommending Chrome Frame, even though I seriously considered it. Why didn't I take the time? Precisely because after watching so many people get burned repeatedly by Google yanking support out from under them, I no longer trust that anything Google provides will still be supported in six months. They've burned too many bridges at this point, to such a degree that at this point, I assume that if Google was behind it, it's only a matter of time before they drop support.
So thanks, Google, for proving my cynic hat astoundingly right yet again.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why the heck do you need Chrome Frame for anyway? Just install Chrome. The supposed advantage is you don't need to launch a new browser but that does not seem like a major issue to me.
So you found IE to be unusable and Chrome is a much better option, but somehow Google is still the bad guy of the story.
Had enough!
I gave up on Chrome when they abandoned side tabs. (Firefox has treetabs)
With the proliferation of 16:9 screens (fu hollywood) everything gets moved to the side where possible.
46137
Not everyone gets to use their choice of browser.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
Chrome Frame is the only way to get WebGL in any IE at this time. There is the discovered support by reverse engineering in IE11 but I haven't yet seen a confirmation from MS that they are going to support it.
We use this to deliver the WebGL parts of our apps to them.
Hope Google changes their mind on this.
Not everyone gets to use their choice of browser.
Architecturally, Chrome frame is pretty similar to just installing Chrome(it has to be, to support rendering pages as they would appear in Chrome). Mysteriously, though, the fact that it's shoved into IE soothes some reactionary IT departments.
Whether or not they are right about this, Google appears to be betting that people who were willing to install Chrome Frame to support something will just install Chrome. Their 'Legacy Browser Support' makes managing the distribution of troublesome pages between the two browsers relatively easy to manage.
Let me see if I understand you correctly. You're saying I should exploit a security hole in ActiveX to forcibly install Chrome on the computer of every user who comes to my website? :-D
I'm not an IE user. At all. I'm a web developer. As a web developer, I don't get to choose what browser people come to my site with. I only get to choose whether to support them or not. Chrome frame provided a fairly lightweight option whereby I could require that they install a simple plug-in and continue using their existing browser. Without that option, the only choice is to tell IE users "Go download another browser or go away." See the problem now?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
No. I've never used IE, so I don't care if it is unusable. As a web developer, I found IE to be unsupportable. Chrome is always a better option. However, most websites cannot realistically tell their users, "You need to switch browsers." Chrome Frame used to provide a mechanism by which websites could support IE without having to actually support IE ("For Internet Explorer users, this website requires the Chrome Frame plug-in. Click here to download it.").
Google is now the bad guy because now the only remaining option available to websites that can't feasibly support IE directly is to tell IE users to FOAD. Now do you get it?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Not everyone gets to use their choice of browser.
but they get to install ie plugins like chrome frame?? hell no. that's why they're discontinuing it. the only people who find use for it CAN NOT FUCKING INSTALL IT due to policies. if they want compatibility("no need to run another browser") they should make ie frame for chrome.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
If you can not install another browser, how come you can install Chrome Frame?
And, sadly, this brings us back to the good old days of "best viewed in Netscape" or "best viewed in Internet Explorer".
Not sure who to blame in this case, though.
Web developer for failing to support the other browser? I assume you're a competent developer, and know what you're doing. Which implies that it's really hard to do some stuff in IE that is easy to pull off in the other browsers.
Browser developers? Some browsers implement features that other browsers don't. That's just like what happened back in the day, the Netscape vs IE browser wars. Though now it seems these features are somewhat related to open standards. Or are those standards so standard? Standard because some w3c published them, or standard because another browser supports the same feature in the same way?
Interesting difference with the previous browser wars is that it's now MS with their IE browser doing the catch-up. They used to be the ones ahead of the pack - it's not just because that so many sites are linked to IE6, which back in the day had many advanced features that other browsers didn't have, and was arguably the most advanced web browser. And with development stalled, it was not obvious that MS would drop those features right away when they continued development.
And I don't see the end of this, really. Not until there is a finished standard and all browsers support that standard. And that won't happen as the standard will never be finished.
...now the only remaining option available to websites that can't feasibly support IE directly is to tell IE users to FOAD.
I see where you're coming from. What I am curious about (as a web developer myself that completely ignores lt-IE9) is what sites are there that "can't feasibly support IE"? Sure, there's the corporate infranet stuff that only knows about users on XP with IE8. There might even be a few niche areas where there is a significant percentage of users on ltIE9 (I'm guessing quilting sites and related things where the age demographic is high). I guess there are probably some government sites that need full IE support for accessibility reasons.
Outside of that, what sites can't feasibly ditch lt-IE9? The one's that can't afford it? As a developer, that is not your problem. If your client/employer can't afford migrating to a modern site, you, as a developer, should be seeing red flags left and right.
When a client tells me they need to support IE8, most of time they are just aping this mentality because that's what someone else told them. This is the important bit...
The only legitimate reason to continue supporting lt-IE9 is as a service to your users.
If you wish to give your users this extra feature, be prepared to pay for it and don't expect it to make you any more money. "Oh, but Bob said we still have 9% of our users on IE8! We need to support it!!!" Ok, well, that extra 9% isn't going to come for free. What if the additional costs amount to more money than the additional revenue generated by that 9%? Then you are now losing money by supporting old technology.
Yes, I totally agree with you, Chrome Frame is a great shiv that is super easy to drop in (already there for HTML5BP, et al) and it gives you peace of mind that your IE8 users of the world won't be completely confused if they load your site and the layout is all whacked; however, what it has ultimately become is one of the last crutches left holding up the rest of the development world.
In my ever not-so-humble opinion, supporting lt-IE9 is akin to rubber-rooming an incompetent union employee. It's a mess that happens when nobody finally stands up to say "ENOUGH!"
Just stop supporting it. That simple. If users complain, tell them something along the lines of,"In order to continue offering our service at a competitive price, we must stop supporting old technologies from time to time." It's not that difficult and users/clients/etc will generally understand. Besides, if they are stuck on IE8, they are probably very used to seeing sites that don't work correctly. They know it's not the site's fault, is the shitty browser they are forced to use.
Honestly, losing Chrome Frame will sting a little, but at some point or another it becomes time to move on.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
You can't really blame any single entity. When it comes down to it, competition and economics are what is responsible for this mess.
You can be the safe guy and built a site that works equally in all browsers. It's going to be a little bit boring of a site, there will be some headaches here and there, but overall, you're providing what you assume your users want.
Or, you can be the not-so-safe guy that says flat out "If you're in IE8, the site is not going to work properly" while at the same time providing a much richer and usable environment for the other 90%+ users.
The decision to go one way or the other ultimately comes down to economics. What is the bottom line of this decision? Currently, the year is 2013 and going forward there is one correct choice and one less-than-correct choice. If you support IE8 now, does that mean you support IE8 until 2020? 2040? Maybe you do... but I'd hate to see the costs associated with doing so.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
... I did not bother to take the time to implement support for using and recommending Chrome Frame, even though I seriously considered it.
All three lines of conditional HTML?
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
That's OK. If your site requires "modern web technologies" to work, nothing of value was lost anyway.
Seriously. What's sad is that some sites that work fine without MWT are imposing it on themselves now. There are a few sites like Craigslist and another non-profit I use that are still using a 1999 sort of look, and as a user THAT'S WHAT I WANT. Most of the other crap is just pointless eyecandy.
As time goes by, I'm becoming more convinced that nothing on the Internet really works well unless the profit motive is out of the picture.
I never really understood the point of Chrome Frame.
Surely the very people who needed to use it (those in a locked down corporate environment) are the very same people who can't install it because they're in a locked down corporate environment?
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You can be the safe guy and built a site that works equally in all browsers. It's going to be a little bit boring of a site, there will be some headaches here and there, but overall, you're providing what you assume your users want.
As a user I may be boring as well, but the vast majority of web sites that I visit do not allow much, if any, interaction. It doesn't go much further usually than a place to leave comments (like this site, or Facebook). The vast majority of corporate web sites that I visit are even more static: they present information about a company, and that's why I visit them. Shopping sites also don't have that much interaction really: you click a link, they say it's available or not, you click a button, and go for payment. Filling in some simple forms on the way.
Those sites I really don't understand why there should be so high levels of complexity involved that it doesn't run in anything not bleeding edge. Sure it may look prettier and so, but the interaction level a browser provides is and will always be far less than what a desktop application can do, for the simple reason that all communication with the backend is asynchronous and request/response based.
Then there are other sites that feature complete word processors (like Google Docs) or specialised editors like circuitlab.com. That's a totally different ballgame, but those sites are a tiny minority of all the web sites out there.
If your site requires "modern web technologies" to work, nothing of value was lost anyway.
"Modern Web Technologies" are not about the users, they're about the developers being given tools to build what needs to be built while at the same time meeting an unrealistic deadline.
Aside from a few nice HTML5 tricks, the majority of the "standard" solves problems that only developers are aware of. Building a site with HTML5 is simply faster and more reliable, especially when you're passing code around to a bunch of developers (some of which were just hired last week).
Does a user care that the page they are viewing is divided into sections, headers, footers, asides, etc? Certainly not. I sure as shit do, however.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
No offense, but this time google is right ending the support. It's going to be 2014, how many people are going to be using those age old IEs? Just put up a page for people using those broken dinosaurs, that they should update the browser.
There just isn't any reason for google to keep that thing updated. It will still run without the updates, so it's not like it'll suddenly stop working. That'll still give you atleast 2 years with this plugin.
...Oh, and have a look at the markup for Craigslist. Yup. That's HTML5 you're looking at (though, the tables are a bit ick).
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
In my case, it's because the site depends heavily on HTML editing actually working and behaving in some sensible and consistent way, and IE did not as of IE 9. I can't remember the laundry list of bugs that I could not find viable workarounds for, but the list was not insignificant, if memory serves.
Yes, that's pretty much the only choice, but that doesn't mean it is a good choice. It's basically equivalent to telling about a third of your users that they don't matter. We're not talking about stinging a little. We're talking about slicing your website's wrists and pouring lemon juice on it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Indeed, this is the category that my site falls into.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I agree with you that ordinary websites should be usable in any browser, and should not depend on modern web technologies to show you content. That doesn't apply to web apps that actually do something useful for the user, though. (Think Google Docs.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
We use ChromeFrame extensively with IE8. The reasons are varied for why we are still on IE8, but we found that it was much more complex to "lock down" Firefox (I seem to recall Fiefox developers advising that Firefox isn't for enterprise/lock down) & Chrome, also our MIS system only supports IE7, 8 & 9. As we still have a large number of XP computers IE8 is our only option.
*but* Chrome is now much less complex to control via GPO (in a similar vein as IEs) and google have now introduced a sort of "reverse" ChromeFrame, (with ChromeFrame you can decided what will be the default render, but also force sites to use IE or ChromeFrame) where Chrome is the default, but you can force certain sites to render in a different browser.
Using Chrome as the standard though, brings a number of other problems, not least the fast update cycle of Chrome, which if we allowed automatic updates means that we have 1000 computers trying to update from the internet when they turn on, and likely find no one can access the internet due to a faulty update ...
(In the same way we don't have individual computer going to windows update, we use an internal WSUS server, Chrome needs somthing similar, a repository we can point to that is local)
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Then there are other sites that feature complete word processors (like Google Docs) or specialised editors like circuitlab.com. That's a totally different ballgame, but those sites are a tiny minority of all the web sites out there.
Those are the very few web sites for which an imperative programming language in the browser makes sense. The rest (expanding hidden comments, expanding porn thumbnails to fill the screen) could be done declarative-style in HTML/CSS.
Does a Slashdot comment count?
Back on-topic: I wonder what exactly it is that doesn't work on IE9, although I'd put the bar at IE10 anyway if you're doing anything that marketeers would claim to be 'an HTML5 site'.
The whole concept is detestable. It's like XBox One, only for everything other than games.
They do, you can force Chrome to render certain sites in a different browser.
try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die
Google is like George R R Martin:
It completely impossible to know who'll die next, but you can always be sure someone's about to die really soon!
Well IE10 requires a PC running Windows 8 so a lot of people will actually be running those "age old IEs".
Internet Explorer 10 no longer supports conditional HTML.
According to Microsoft it is no longer necessary, since IE supports everything now!
Of course I found out they no longer allow conditional HTML when their so-called implementation of a feature was broken (don't remember which one exactly).
Having said that, IE9 and IE10 are a huge improvement over IE8.
I agree... Our whole corporate infrastructure was about to standardise on a modern browser (the options were obviously FireFox and Chrome), if it wasn't for one core application (that can only work on IE8).
We had to make a choice - recode everything else to be downwards compatible with IE8, try and get the vendor to recode their application, or use Google Frame for selected applications...
I agree; I hope Google changes their minds.
But Google is still jumping the gun by three months on killing Chrome Frame. A hugely popular not-sane OS will continue to be supported until April of 2014.
F Chrome. Until they bring back side tabs, or let mod authors modify the UI to enable similar, I won't touch Chrome. I don't recommend it to any of my collegues, friends, or family....instead, show them Firefox with Tree Style Tabs.
I ran into the same problem. Web development is not exactly my typical line of work, but a customer asked for a small project. I couldn't get it (basically a simple webpage that fetches stuff from a database with AJAX) to work with IE no matter what - until I added the meta tags into the HTML:
After these, things started to work with same code that worked with Firefox and Chrome. I haven't bothered since, but most of the issues apparently stemmed from IE wrongly deciding when to go into compatibility mode.
There are a few sites like Craigslist and another non-profit I use that are still using a 1999 sort of look, and as a user THAT'S WHAT I WANT. Most of the other crap is just pointless eyecandy.
The majority demands what you call "pointless eyecandy". Supporting the desires of the >=51% is more profitable than supporting yours.
while at the same time providing a much richer and usable environment for the other 90%+ users.
Right there is the problem. What the fuck does a "much richer" environment have to do with getting at what you want from a web page? How many times do I have to go to sites and wait while some shitty Flash video shoves itself down my throat or have to try and navigate through what should be simple dropdown menus, only to find that each site implements the menu differently?
Stop trying to give people a "richer environment" and let them get at the information they need. One shouldn't have to jump through hoops just to get a contact address/email/phone number or a white paper which might give you a clue as to why the company's software horfs all over Windows 7 but worked perfectly in XP.
People don't want a "richer environment" when surfing the web. They want to get on with their lives without having to guess which browser to use, or what plugin they might need or have to guess where things are. Stop trying to show off the latest and greatest, whiz bang web shit because you think it's cool and edgy.
KISS. That's all you need to know.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Does a user care that the page they are viewing is divided into sections, headers, footers, asides, etc? Certainly not. I sure as shit do, however.
Some web site operators intentionally don't use semantic markup for business reasons. They don't want automated processes copying the information on their site without paying for the privilege.
Well IE10 requires a PC running Windows 8
That changed about three months ago. IE 10 is available for Windows 7 now.
WebGL doesn't work on iOS either (outside iAds), and those who rely on it are branded incompetent. Instead of making WebGL, try making a native app.
I don't because it is a naive beginner mistake to think that there would be long term support for a product who's sole purpose is to get you _from_ IE _to_ chrome.
Does the default ActiceX policy used in corporate sites (those people who cannot install programs easily) allow users to install third party ActiveX plugins like Google Frame or not?
For companies and users who are on Windows 7, this isn't that big of a deal. IE10 may not be quite as good as Chrome or Firefox, but it's a modern browser that works reasonably well. The problem is for users who are still on XP. Since XP only supports IE8, a decent browser experience requires either Chrome Frame or switching to Chrome or Firefox. And many businesses will allow plugins, but not alternate browsers.
Yes, I know that XP is officially supposed to end support in mid-2014. But I don't believe that is actually going to happen. There are just too many people still on XP, both large corporations and inexperienced home users. The corporations (and some governments!) will lean very hard on MS to keep providing security patches, and the home users (there are still a LOT of these with XP) are going to be very angry when they find that their systems are now impossible to keep safe. I believe that ending support for XP will be politically impossible. And I don't mean office politics; I mean actual Congressional-level politics. I think there is a good chance that the world's governments will not let MS stop patching XP because it is just too important to the world economy.
A web developer can browse in Firefox but still needs to test in IE, and in practice, this means testing in multiple versions of IE. Microsoft's solution has been to make each IE version available in the form of a multi-gigabyte VHD of Windows to run in VirtualBox. Good luck fitting those into your satellite or microwave plan's monthly cap or keeping a restaurant Wi-Fi connection going long enough to download those.
Magic. Chrome frame doesn't need admin privs to install, yet Chrome does. It also doesn't go through the same process, Chrome Frame is just a browser plug-in, while Chrome has to go through the standard application install which many corporations don't allow.
A large percentage that is true. Corporations lock down systems so users can not install applications, but they can still install Chrome Frame.
seriously? I still use ass tabs. And force everything to stay in the ass and keep the gay bar. That's what is pissing me off. I need the gay bar.
Interesting. Looks like something wrong with my hosting provider. Either that or somebody recently exploited some new hole in PHPBB that I don't know about yet. I'll look into it.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Embrace, extend, extinguish!
None of my problems involved the network. They were mostly bugs in the HTML editing behavior. The nearly unusable support for DOM selection objects was among the worst problems (no containsNode). I tried some of the tricks that Rangy uses, but even those were not sufficient to work around some of the bugs, IIRC. And I'm pretty sure I never did get copy/paste handling working adequately in IE. (The website requires the final HTML to conform strictly to a structure, which is not an easy thing to do even in WebKit and Firefox, both of which require entirely different code to work around the lack of a sane and standardized undo manger.)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
How do I know you don't work in corporate Amercia
And IE8 is still a bit better than 7.
They are still a piece of shit. But "better" is a relative term.
Rethinking email
All database backups are blank, and the PHPBB forum portion of the site has been broken since at least April (which is as far back as the archive.org archives go). A Google search reveals links that suggest that despite my attempts to lock down the board where no one could add accounts to it directly, someone constructed the URL directly (without clicking the nonexistent account links) and added accounts, then used them to post spam. I thought that I had disabled account creation more completely than that, but apparently I didn't do as good a job as I thought I did. Either way, it is disappointing that the captcha was so completely worthless at preventing spam.
My suspicion is that the site is down because my ISP got a complaint of some sort about something those bots posted (DMCA, abuse, law enforcement, take your pick). Sadly, I have no backups (and archive.org has no record of it prior to the error you're seeing, and Google won't let me look at caches for the site), so I can't determine what those bots posted. Because of the flood of bot attacks on my site, the site's logs only go back for two days, so I can't even see what means the attackers used for cracking into the PHPBB site, much less determine whether the wipe was a legitimate act by my ISP (in which case why in h*** wasn't I notified?) or a malicious act by yet another attacker. I've asked my ISP to produce logs farther back, but I have no idea if they are able to do so or not.
Either way, at this point, I would strongly urge anyone with a PHPBB installation to check your logs for malicious activity ASAP. If my forums can get attacked in this way, then anyone's can.
Will follow up if and when I learn more. My ISP has opened up a "hacked website" ticket, and is looking into the matter, whatever that means. My gut feeling says that I'm on my own, though, and that my best bet is to dump PHPBB as quickly as humanly possible in favor of something that was actually designed with security in mind to begin with. We shall see.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
huh.. figured it was just a misconfigured bit that you hadn't gotten around to fixing.. didn't realize it'd open up a can of worms. Thanks for the secondary follow-up - and yes, please do post more info if you get it. ( Eventually Slashdot will stop allowing replies in this thread, of course :)
"Richer" in this context refers to things such as schema.org data that allows users to see more pertinent information in search results before they ever arrive at your site. It means having semantic markup that is easier to maintain and develop leaving more time for bug fixes and other anomalies that make a site less usable. It means being able to push properly sized images to the user, allowing them to download the 10kb image instead of the 45kb image for presumably low-bandwidth devices. It means serving them a video that will actually play on their device without having to run through all sorts of hoops.
You reference KISS, and I agree; however, your perspective is incorrect, probably because you're not a web developer. In order to KISS for users, you have to add a number of complexities to the code to handle all the different ways a page renders on all the different environments. If you want to KISS for developers, at some point, you're going to have to abandon old technology because it simply is no longer relevant.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
but that doesn't mean it is a good choice.
Ah, but in the long run, it probably is a good choice. At some point, gas stations had to stop selling leaded fuel as well. Did it affect a percentage of their users? Sure. Did it affect their revenue short-term? Sure. Was it a good decision in the long run? Absolutely.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.