Infrequently Noted

So you're making the new shiny — 'cause that's how you roll — and you're thinking to yourself "hrm, I've told users of legacy browsers to get Chrome Frame or upgrade, but there's this new awesome feature in the Chrome Developer Channel...but it's not in the version of Chrome Frame I'm testing with. I thought I was on the Dev channel?"

Indeed, if you installed GCF prior to the Beta release, you would have been on the Dev version, but when the Beta was pushed, all existing GCF users were moved to it as a one-time transition. That means you might not be getting the new shiny features we're pouring into Dev as quickly as you anticipated...but fear not! There's a new Dev Channel Release available. If you're developing sites with GCF and you want to see what's coming, I highly recommend getting and testing against this version. You won't be moved to Beta again, so this uninstall/reinstall is a one-time change.

As folks begin to use and test with GCF, one of the first many try is to use the OptInUrls registry key to over-ride a site's preference about which renderer to use. This tends to cause confusion and spurious bug reports because many sites employ server-side User-Agent detection to send different content to different browsers. Since GCF uses IE's network stack and reports a slightly modified IE User-Agent instead of Chrome's UA, server-side detection may send IE-specialized content instead of Chrome-friendly content. This includes many large sites like Yahoo, GMail, and most sites built with GWT's server-side detection.

These are not bugs.

Those sites are working as intended and GCF is operating correctly. What's happening, instead, is that by adding sites to the OptInUrls list that do not understand GCF, you're breaking the contract at the core of how GCF works: existing content works the way it always has. It's only when you're sure that a site is sending browser-neutral content (usually when it's your site) that you should ever add a site to the OptInUrls list for your system or organization. As usual, if you've got questions about GCF that aren't answered in the FAQs or docs, you can ask them on the Google Group for the project. The whole team is subscribed to the list and we're focused on helping you make awesome apps, so stop by, say howdy, and let us know how it's going.

Today we launched our first Beta release of Google Chrome Frame (aka "GCF").

In some ways it's a strange product; it's working best when you notice it least. As a developer, you shouldn't have to think much about it other than to include the header or meta tag or and optionally add a couple of lines of script to prompt users to install the plugin -- a process which notably doesn't require a restart and doesn't take users off of your site. There's no new tool to learn, no new language you have to wrap your head around...in fact, the hardest part might just be putting down all the habits we've collected for catering to legacy browsers. The new features in Chrome Frame are all the existing features you haven't been able to exercise yet.

As I've begun to build exclusively to modern browsers, the experience of concerted un-learning of hacks and the ability to write directly to the platform again, sans toolkit, has been eye opening. Yes, there's still a lot that can be improved in DOM, CSS, and HTML, but things are moving, and the tools we need now aren't the tools we have today. Better yet, there's every indication that things are progressing fast enough that instead of building tools to bring up the rear, we'll be building them to shield ourselves from the ferocious pace of improvement should we need them at all.

If you're starting a new project today, I encourage you to prototype to HTML5 and modern features and then think hard about what you're building and for whom. Do these apps really need to run on legacy browsers? Why not just use GCF to make that pain and expense go away. Once you've experienced how good modern web development can be -- how rich and fast the apps you can deliver are -- I'm convinced that you'll find it hard to go back. The rich, open, interoperable web is the platform of the future, and I couldn't be happier that GCF is going to help deliver that future.