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."

Comments

IE still doesn't support modern web technologies.

[dgatwood]

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.