Most modern internet browsers now support the newest HTML 5 coding, but sadly, Internet Explorer is the only web browser out there (with the exception of any mobile browsers) that does not natively support it yet. For those of you who aren’t familiar with web design, HTML is the Hyper-Text Markup Language. This, as well as various other components, give a website its design. A simple analogy of this would be a control room. The people inside the control room would be the HTML programming, given a set of commands to follow, such as redirect flight A to runway B. The flight A would be a plug-in, and runway B would be another form of file, usually Javascript or Cascading Style Sheets, but anyways, the control tower would tell the plugin to run on a certain instruction set (javascript or CSS).
The new HTML 5 is a vast improvement over HTML 4. For example, instead of having to install a separate program to run flash (Adobe Flash plug-in, which is sadly not compatible with Safari Mobile), HTML 5 would be able to run video and sound files without the need for additional plug-ins. Some other new functions include 2-D drawing inside the HTML code, timed media playback (playing a file, say fifteen seconds after you load the website), offline storage (similar to cookies, but more advanced), document editing (Google Docs or Office Live), drag-and-drop (good for file hosting where you have to specify the path of the file), and much more. You may wonder how much of this may affect an average user, but these changes are quite significant. Flash files are larger than most components in a website. These files create beautiful special effects, but they may take some time to load on old, or slow computers. The new HTML 5 will integrate that into itself, so that it can play videos and sounds without having to load much extras. Document editing is currently restricted to its respective online service, like Office Live or Google Docs. These both require you to import files in order to edit and distribute, but the improvements in the HTML 5 allow it to be edited locally and saved locally, without having to upload and download the file.
All this may sound very nice, but as stated above, Internet Explorer does not support the HTML 5, whereas Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Safari all support it. With the release of Google’s new Google Wave service, they also release a new method of allowing Internet Explorer work with HTML 5 with a plug-in. Their Google Chrome Frame is something you just install into your computer, and whenever there is a website with a certain metadata embedded into the HTML, it will automatically change Internet Explorer to run on the Google Chrome rendering engine, rather than the Internet Explorer’s default one. This new introduction of the frame makes it easier for web programmers, since they can make Internet Explorer render the exact same page as Google Chrome, which eliminates a few shortcomings when it comes to the way Internet Explorer renders pages (such as mis-aligned boxes, uncentered objects, etc.). The main reason why Google released this wasn’t to kick Microsoft in the back, but rather to allow everyone to be able to use their Wave service in the future. Internet Explorer makes up a very large group of browsers used (even though it is arguably the worst), so developers cannot afford to just forget about Internet Explorer.
Chrome, within IE8, there is no decernable difference.
I tried using it for a while, and I certainly noticed it is faster in rendering webpages than the original Internet Explorer 8. I generally use Google Chrome because of its clean interface and fast response, this plug-in really makes Internet Explorer a joy to use (even though there is still the issue with slow opening and memory usage). I’m running a 64-bit computer, so I can’t be sure whether or not it would work on the 64-bit edition of it or not. I’ll update it this post when I create a simple HTML document to simulate it.
While I expect that Google’s intentions are good, it is rather audacious for them to do something like this. I think that this will make it much better for users, even though the large portion of the users using Internet Explorer wouldn’t know how to install the Google Chrome Frame. Hopefully the next Internet Explorer will be able to support HTML 5 in the next version, but until then, we’ll just have to live with this and hope Microsoft doesn’t release a security patch “addressing 3rd party plug-ins affecting the core functionality of the browser”.
