Google's intentions are unclear, Shaver admitted, and Mozilla has not talked directly with Google about Chrome Frame.
"And we wouldn't want Google to do for us what they did for Microsoft," Shaver said. "We started to get some inbound from our community about Chrome Frame, and the more we did, the more we decided that we'd rather have people using Chrome the browser rather than Chrome Frame." Shaver acknowledged that some of Mozilla's motivation for taking Chrome Frame to the woodshed was in its own interest. Shaver, meanwhile, panned Chrome Frame for some of the same things that Microsoft used to hammer Google earlier, including breaking IE's private browsing mode. Mozilla staked out its position on Chrome Frame Tuesday, when both Shaver and Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla and current chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, took swipes at Google for releasing the plug-in.īoth Shaver and Baker called the plug-in a bad idea, with Baker arguing that it would confuse readers over which browser was rendering a site, divide personal details like site passwords and browsing history between two applications and cede control over users' browsing experience to site designers. "They've chosen not to ship yet," said Shaver, talking about plug-ins for the two browsers. Shaver said that Chrome Frame, which is open source, includes technologies that could be destined for Firefox as well as Opera Software's Opera browser. Google developers claimed they spent "countless hours" tweaking Wave for IE, but gave up in favor of producing a plug-in instead. Specifically, Google said it created Chrome Frame because it wasn't worth the time and trouble to make its new collaboration and communications tool, Google Wave, work with IE. Google pitched the plug-in as a way to instantly boost the speed of the notoriously slow IE and as a means for Web developers to support standards IE can't handle, including HTML 5.
23, currently only supports IE6, IE7 and IE8, and lets those Microsoft browsers utilize the Chrome browser's WebKit rendering engine, as well as its V8 JavaScript engine. Chrome Frame, which Google launched Sept.