Google Chrome for Internet Explorer

A Brief History of Time Spent on IE

For years web developers have struggled with browsers that don't support standards or the latest innovations and that just won't go away. Internet Explorer 6 falls into this category and is the bane of many a web developer's existence. Internet Explorer 6 rolled out in late 2001 and stuck around, essentially unchallenged, until late 2006. Since then we've seen Internet Explorer 7 come and most recently Internet Explorer 8 in late 2008.

Unfortunately Internet Explorer 6 is so firmly entrenched that as of August 2009, it has more market share (13.6%) than Internet Explorer 8 (10.6%) according to W3Schools (other browser tracking sites verify this). Internet Explorer 6 beats out Chrome (7.0%), Safari (3.3%) and Opera (2.1%) combined and is right behind Internet Explorer 7 (15.1%). Reasons for this seemingly intractable position range from IT department policies against upgrades by users, to applications built exclusively for Internet Explorer 6 (precluding an upgrade without a rebuilt), to users on older systems who don't know how, or don't care, to upgrade.

So for nearly 8 years we've struggled with an outdated browser, only being replaced by updated versions of Internet Explorer that take moderate steps toward enhanced standards support, such as CSS level 2, HTML5, enhanced JavaScript support, and just better stability overall.

Some sites have taken matters into their own hands. YouTube prompts IE6 users to upgrade to Chrome, IE8 or Firefox. Digg ran a survey of its users to plot out a strategy to deal with IE6. Brighkite tells visitors using IE6 that the site will look terrible and to upgrade. Just search for "IE6 must die" and start to peruse the 1.8 million hits.

Google Chrome Frame

Google has taken an ingenious approach to deal with Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 and their general lack of standards support. It has found a way to embed Chrome right into IE.

Google Chrome Frame is an open-source plug-in for Internet Explorer versions 6, 7 and 8 that essentially embeds an instance of Google Chrome into Internet Explorer. Doing this will allow users surfing in IE with this plug-in to take advantage of HTML5 elements not yet supported in IE and also leverage Chrome's faster JavaScript engine. This is currently an "early-stage" release and intended for developers and testing, so there is no guessing how well it might work on your platform.

Google has a vested interest in getting this to work — Google would love to get Google Wave and other Google applications up and running on a stable platform, and since Chrome won't have the market share immediately, IE is a reasonable platform to target. The Chromium Blog entry for today explains a bit more:

With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and canvas, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.

The Google Blog entry for Chrome Frame has the following video embedded with a Google employee (wearing a Threadless t-shirt, I sense a trend) walking viewers through the basics:

Making It Go...

To initialize the Webkit-based rendering engine users will need to embed the following meta tag on a page (Google links to the Microsoft article addressing how to use a variation of this tag that tells IE8 to emulate IE7):

meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1"

For pages/sites where you cannot modify the meta tags, Chrome Frame allows you to initialize it by pre-pending a URL with cf:. If you want to visit my site in Chrome Frame, you'd go to cf:http://adrianroselli.com/. Google provides more information for developers, as well as a client-side detection script for Chrome Frame, at its Developer's Guide.

Testing Chrome Frame on my own site from Internet Explorer 7, I can see that it changed the user agent string by adding "chromeframe." The new user agent string from my IE7 install reads (emphasis added):

Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; chromeframe; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; MS-RTC LM 8).

So What Now?

Will this truly usher in new life for IE users? If a user cannot install a new version of IE on his/her system, will he/she be allowed to install the plug-in? Will the average user even care? What logic can be written to prompt a user to download this plug-in (outside of the examples they provide)? These and many other questions are still to be answered, but since Chrome Frame was just announced today, it's not unexpected.

Even if a user does go through the trouble of downloading and installing Chrome Frame, developers will need to come up with metrics to determine the market share of this browser-within-a-browser. It may be hard to evaluate whether or not users are taking advantage of its functionality by reviewing your site statistics, at least not without spending time parsing out the "chromeframe" string. Instead developers may be stuck relying on other developers actually implementing the features to see if anyone is using it, and we all know that site statistics from one site aren't necessarily a good indicator of how those numbers will play out on your own site.

Verified: Google Ignores Meta Keywords

In a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog today (Google does not use the keywords meta tag in web ranking), Google has clarified its policy on meta tags and page rank. Those of us trying to protect our clients from SEO/SEM snake-oil salesmen are happy to finally have an official statement from Google. In short, here it is:

• Google does not use meta keywords in its web search ranking and "has ignored the keywords meta tag for years."
• Google sometimes uses the description meta tag as the abstract for search results, but not for web search ranking.

There are many other variants of the meta tag, including some unique to Google. See the Google Webmaster help page discussing meta tags for a list of values Google supports (pay attention to the robots meta tag). Watch the video below for an explanation from a Google representative and his Threadless t-shirt.

Corporate Social Media Policies

Chris Boudreaux is the author of an upcoming book titled Social Media Governance. His goal with the book is to help "companies clarify and manage social media priorities, coordinate shared investments (such as information security and compliance), and define meaningful metrics to hold stakeholders accountable for performance of social media and social application investments."

Mr. Boudreaux has created an accompanying web site that contains a database of links to social media policies of over 80 organizations. The list is broken down by industry: Agencies: Advertising, PR, Marketing; Business Products or Services; Consumer Products or Services; Healthcare; Government or Non-Profit; General Guidelines and Templates.

Sometimes a company wants to build a social media strategy, sometimes they want to address how their staff reference the organization in social media outlets, and sometimes an organization is dragged kicking and screaming into social media to address what others say about them in a social forum. As more and more organizations realize the potential of social media, having access to documents like these can save valuable time path finding and stumbling. This resource can allow organizations to track down policies used by others in their industry without the need to make it up as they go.

There are some interesting examples within the pages, such as this one from Wal-Mart's Twitter External Discussion Guidelines, written by someone who seemingly spends a good deal of time plugged into Internet memes:

We won't reply to off topic @replies. Personal attacks and foul language = FAIL. Adding to the discussion = WIN.

The U.S. Air Force has a flowchart for its public affairs representatives to use should they discover a blog post about the U.S. Air Force (click the image for a larger view):

Some of the policies include what would like to think is common sense, but which all too often is not, such as this sample from ESPN: "If you wouldn't say it on the air or write it in your column, don't tweet it."

The Associated Press (AP) has a listing in the database, but the address doesn't work any longer. Back in June the AP came under attack for policies that seemed a little too aggressive, suggesting that AP employees should delete comments an employee's friends might make about the AP on an employee's Facebook wall. The example (emphasis added):

Q. Anything specific to Facebook?

It's a good idea to monitor your profile page to make sure material posted by others doesn't violate AP standards; any such material should be deleted. Also, managers should not issue friend requests to subordinates, since that could be awkward for employees. It's fine if employees want to initiate the friend process with their bosses.

The NFL and Chad Ochocinco have been locked in a struggle that culminated with the NFL posting its own rules essentially saying that play-by-play tweeting was not allowed, bypassing a plan by Ochocinco to signal friends to tweet pre-planned updates during the game. Ochocinco twote that he would essentially take his ball and go home, telling his followers that he was going to delete his account. He hasn't done it.

If you're an organization considering your own social media policy, the samples are very useful. The following articles might provide more help in fleshing it out and customizing it to your needs:

• Should Your Company Have a Social Media Policy?
• 10 Must-Haves for Your Social Media Policy

If you do come up with your own, you can add it the policy database. At least that's what the form on the site claims.

Three Good Site Search Articles

A List Apart has posted a triple threat today: three articles on site search and reporting.

1. Testing Search for Relevancy and Precision by John Ferrara discusses relevancy testing and precision testing for your search results based on what users have searched for within your web site. He even provides a spreadsheet to help you calculate relevanc, equations in place and ready to go.
2. Internal Site Search Analysis: Simple, Effective, Life Altering! by Avinash Kaushik presents methods to analyze your site search data to determine the intent of users. He uses Google Analytics in his examples, handy for so very many of us to see what is essentially a tutorial in practice.
3. Beyond Goals: Site Search Analytics from the Bottom Up by Lou Rosenfeld (who wrote up a case study on evolt.org in one of his books a few years back) addresses how a bottom-up analysis of site search data can provide valuable insight into user goals and behavior. He builds on the examples from the first two articles and ties them all together rather nicely.

Google Chrome 3 Released

Google has announced the release of Chrome version 3 (stable release). Given that it just celebrated its first anniversary earlier this month, it may catch up to Internet Explorer versions in no time.

Speed

Google claims the latest release is faster — 150% faster in JavaScript performance since the first beta and more than 25% faster than the last stable release. Google doesn't offer up any comparisons against other browsers, however.

New Tab Page

The New Tab page (the blank page you come to when opening Chrome or opening a new tab) has been modified since the last beta release. You can rearrange the thumbnails and even pin thumbnails so they don't go away. The page also offers more customization options than before, such as displaying the pages as a list of links.

The Omnibox

What Google calls the Omnibox is the address bar that also acts as a search bar. Google has added icons to the drop-down menu to help distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your surfing history.

HTML5 Support

Insofar as it is possible to support a spec that is still being written, Chrome added support for some of the core elements. In this release Chrome has added support for video and linked out to a sample site to test drive it. Google already had support for the audio and canvas elements and links to the 50th Chrome Experiment page to prove it.

Themes

Chrome now supports themes. All those UI enhancements Google has worked so hard on can now be casually tossed aside by just grabbing an ugly theme. The example they show is the Stargazer theme. There are more in the Themes Gallery.

Update (9-17-2009): Google Chrome seems almost optimized for the Nintendo Entertainment System JavaScript emulator. Check it out at http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/. It runs much faster in Chrome than in Firefox.

Twitter Updates ToS

On Thursday Twitter updated its Terms of Service. Much has already been said about how Twitter has confirmed that you as the author own your own tweets, but I was more taken with how Twitter made the new Terms easier to read for those of us who haven't gotten a law degree. Twitter has inserted "tips" in key areas of their Terms to state their intent in plain English. Here are the tips, culled from their Terms by section:

Basic Terms

• What you say on Twitter may be viewed all around the world instantly. You are what you Tweet!
• [On advertising:] We're leaving the door open for exploration in this area but we don't have anything to announce.

Privacy

• You can opt-out of most communications from Twitter including our newsletter, new follower emails, etc. Please see the Notices tab of Settings for more.

Your Rights

• This license is you authorizing us to make your Tweets available to the rest of the world and to let others do the same. But what’s yours is yours – you own your content.
• Twitter has an evolving set of rules for how API developers can interact with your content. These rules exist to enable an open ecosystem with your rights in mind.

Restrictions on Content and Use of the Services

• Twitter does not disclose personally identifying information to third parties except in accordance with our Privacy Policy.
• We encourage and permit broad re-use of Content. The Twitter API exists to enable this.

Twitter also links off to its Impersonation Policy, its Trademark Policy and its account suspension information page.

Mashable posted an article yesterday distilling many of these rules down in "10 People You Won't See on Twitter Anymore." The ten they've identified:

1. The Impersonator: using a celebrity or brand name (this led to Twitter's Verified Accounts service).
2. The Bot: tools that auto-tweet or re-tweet. This could be an issue for organizations like Ride for Roswell, that uses its @RideForRoswell account to push tweets about the event at pre-scheduled times. There are many accounts that may now fall under suspicion when it may not be warranted (like @cr_wookie, which is too fun to kill).
3. The Naked Chick: profile photos and/or backgrounds that are clearly pr0n.
4. The Serial Abuser: multiple accounts, constant follow/unfollow behavior, lots of @replies (unsolicited or duplicates) are some of the behaviors that will trigger this.
5. The Squatter: think domain name squatters and you get the gist.
6. The Slimy Salesman: a little less specific, but as users we know them when we see them. Twitter says aggressive tactics and follower churn will get you flagged.
7. The Hashtag Spammer: using a hashtag to ride the wave of a trending topic when your post has nothing to do with it.
8. The Plagiarizer: retweeting sans attribution. Use your RTs people!
9. The Über Oversharer or Bully: Twitter bans direct threats of violence. I'm pretty confident that they mean real life violence.
10. The Faker: If you try to integrate the Twitter Verified Account badge into your profile photo or background, you're out.

The Point?

Twitter is doing two key things here: 1. Giving subscribers confidence that they understand copyright and fair use concerns (especially after the Facebook fracas) and 2. demonstrating that they are reacting to spammers. So far reaction has been positive for both, but I'm particularly curious to see how Twitter can keep on top of all the spammage when they don't have an army of staff to monitor the service. In Internet time, we should know in a few weeks.

Facebook Stalks Twitter

It's been a busy day over at Facebook HQ. They have announced three new features/applications that are either influenced directly by Twitter or can be viewed as direct competitors to features of Twitter.

@Replies in Status Updates

A compelling feature of Twitter is the ability to either respond directly to another Twit by leading your tweet with an '@' and Twitter account name, or reference another twit by including the @username anywhere in the tweet. If someone puts @aardrian in his/her tweet, I am notified in some fashion (some third-party applications handle it differently depending on your preferences)

Facebook launched a similar, but different, feature today and will be rolling it out over coming weeks.

The gist is this: Start a status update and begin to reference a friend by typing an '@.' A menu will appear at that point allowing you to select one of your Facebook friends (or groups/events/apps/pages). The '@' goes away once you select someone, but that name remains a link to the person's profile. The person you referenced will be notified via email and/or a wall post that he/she was mentioned in your update.

Facebook Lite

Launched but not widely available, Facebook Lite is a stripped down version of your Facebook friend feed. The idea was to create a simpler interface that focuses on the updates from your friends. The speculation is that it's intended to mimic the Twitter feed, but with the uniquely Facebook features. Mashable has screen captures in their article, "BREAKING: Facebook Lite Is Live."

Facebook Pushes FriendFeed Open Source

A month ago Facebook aquired FriendFeed and called many of its aggregation features its own as a result. Today Facebook is releasing the web framework that powers the real-time functionality of FriendFeed as an open source tool called Tornado. Organizations that are looking for a framework designed to focus specifically on speed and performance for real-time data throughput have another option that has already been stress-tested as a Facebook add-on and stand-alone application.

Read more:

• http://www.tornadoweb.org/, The Tornado web site.
• Tornado: Facebook's Real-Time Web Framework for Python over at the Facebook developer blog.
• The technology behind Tornado, FriendFeed's web server over at Facebook’s Director of Products, Bret Taylor, personal blog.