Crazy Right? Well it’s all down to a new V8 JavaScript rendering engine, which boasts an improvement of 35%.

That’s great! What does it mean for Web Development?

Hopefully this new engine will inspire other browser programmers how to render JavaScript faster, which in 3-6 months should mean the average user experience (the 35% of users who  upgrade their browser when updates are released) should be improved.

However, this does not mean we can use create complex JavaScript websites (Such as Facebook) render quickly, instead it means subtle usability improvements to a web page should be more effective.

Note: Is anyone interested in trying to recreate this but showing other browsers loading?

How it works

Google Chrome Frame seems quite easy to support, all the web developer needs to do is add the following code into the head of the web page they want to run like Google Chrome Frame:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

If the user has Google Chrome Frame installed the page will render like Chrome, if not the page will load as normal.

First Impressions

When I first saw this product I had two concerns:

• If a user knows they need a better browsing experience, they should upgrade to a better browser. Wouldn’t this just delay the uptake of better browsers?
• If a user can’t upgrade to a better browser (Due to corporate restrictions, low bandwidth or lack of information) the odds they will be not be allowed to install Google Chrome Frame. Which makes me wonder how many people will actually benefit from it?

Having said that the product also has its positive points, for example if a company has a network based on IE6 they may find that upgrading to another browser could cause their system to fail. Google Chrome Frame allows them to keep the old software while still work on more advanced browser bases developments, without breaking their network.

I can’t decide whether this product is beneficial for the development of the web, or if it’s just giving users another reason not to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6.

What do you think? Does Google Chrome Frame encourage users to not upgrade, or does it make web developers lives easier? Leave your views in the comment section below.

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Key Features

• HTML 5 – Essentially this means more people will be able to support markup such as the video tag and footer tag, which makes the internet a more indefinable place. We can also stop using those annoying < object> tags to play flash videos (Which normally causes invalid code).
• TraceMonkey JavaScript Engine – This makes our JavaScript run faster, which means we can use jQuery less sparingly.
• Geo-Location – We can easily localize our users experience.
• More CSS Features – Mainly the ability to download fonts, which gives us more freedom with typography.

If you want to read in a bit more detail the new features of Mozilla FireFox 3.5, take a look at Firefox 3.5 for developers.

Youtube – What is a Browser?