Retiring Chrome Frame
blog.chromium.org
blog.chromium.org
Sometimes, it makes sense to retire products. And if you're not making money on the product, then it can be expensive to keep supporting it. I think six months is still a reasonable amount of advanced notice. No matter what, a small minority will be unhappy.
I think the real lesson here is: don't build something serious on top of a product you don't pay for and you don't have any guarantees on support.
6 Months in the Enterprise world is a barely time enough to sneeze... Anyways I am fine, its a lesson learned.
Actually they're going to stop providing IE6/7 support and patches in a little under a year.
Doesn't matter, they already have supported it for centuries in tech years.
So Chrome Frame helped Google a bit to extend a certain market for them by a little bit. Google still doesn't get paid, but they certainly didn't do Google Frame out of altruism.
The Chrome Frame retirement announcement points them to a solution for that, Google Chrome for Business [1] with Legacy Browser Support [2].
[1] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/
[2] https://www.google.com/intl/en/chrome/business/browser/lbs.h...
Chrome Frame always seemed like a nasty hack which was unlikely to get much traction in companies that haven't updated from IE6.
Since they already switched from supporting IE6 to using modern technology as if IE6 didn't exist, then maybe they just won't bother switching back. Maybe it will be more cost-effective, at least for some of them, to finally ditch IE6. And that would be a win. The cancellation of Google Frame may be what is needed to break the feedback loop that keeps IE6 afloat.
With the virtual currency of trust towards Google as a competent solutions vendor.
They can't have it both ways: if everyone thought like that, nobody would have uses Chrome Frame.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES
OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND
NONINFRINGEMENT OF THIRD PARTY RIGHTS.
As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes the policy to never use 3rd party software without an explicit support agreement is quite sane. But this is also a good argument for why open source and minimal complexity are good choices.
And even less something that was always intended to be a quick workaround for users under very strict (or lazy) IT organizations that didn't upgrade to a decent browser in years.
Kudos to Google for creating and supporting it, until now. Time to take off the training wheels.
Chrome for Business looks like a solid and proper upgrade path, but it does require a semi-progressive IT team.
Those XP machines will never be upgraded and many won't be replaced until there are no spare parts anymore.
One really can't trust Google to keep anything around for more than 6 months
PS XP is 12 years old.
But you are right that they should be praised for the past work.
http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/src/chrome_frame...
:)
> Most IT admins I've dealt with refuse to install any other
> browsers on their systems, but don't have a problem
> with browser plugins for some reason
Why don't you just deploy Chrome itself? Google has made a version of Chrome that can install without admin rights.
I have a feeling this was Google's plan all along: 1) get everybody dependent on Chrome with Chrome Frame, 2) make version of Chrome that installs without admin 3) remove support for Chrome Frame 4) $$$ profit from massive switchover to Chrome inside the enterprise as developers make an end run around IT by using the non-admin install.
I enjoy the witty snaps, but realistically, it just shows your out of touch with the enterprise space.
I am not talking client facing apps, all of those are cross browser up to date to ensure maximum visibility, i am talking intranet enterprise apps so hideous no one who isnt paid to use them ever would... these are the backroads that only the farmhands use. the overseers are like you want to throw an automatic carriage back here, but we pushed for it, and just as it rolls out i gotta tell em the automatic carriage company stopped selling gasoline, and they just look at me laugh, and say horses run on hay...
thats all it is aint the end of the world, aint even a big deal, i will write an active x control and embed it in the page to do what i need... horse and buggy style
Nor an insurance company.
Nor a bank.
Nor large agrobusiness.
The tech industry is not the only industry that exists in the world. There are many industries where software does not form the basis of competitive advantage. In those cases, IT is not the most efficient use of capital.
Getting these sorts of issues (and bigger ones) right is something big companies call "IT strategy" and they'll often pay consultants real money for it. That's because, done well, IT can be the foundation of significant competitive advantages. Is using a more modern browser going to create an advantage all by itself? Almost certainly not. But the kind of IT organization that can't even handle something that simple is going to struggle mightily with the bigger fish.
For example, a bank competes on the basis of access to capital (i.e., deposits), which depends primarily on size, location, and interest rates. Given the choice between upgrading their computers and opening a new branch, it is much better to open a new branch.
Just saying "switch to Firefox" or "change products" is simply not an option.
- Maintenance and support costs are notably higher than they would be with a newer system. It is worth noting that, technically speaking, Microsoft hasn't stopped supporting Windows XP. They're just raising the price and requiring a bespoke service agreement for XP support.
- Not working with newer browsers means not working with smartphones and tablets. A company could be passing up opportunities to improve productivity with mobile devices.
- It may be difficult or (practically) impossible to scale an old, brittle system with the needs of the business, especially if the old system has issues with newer hardware.
- It may not interoperate well with newer systems in the organization, foreclosing opportunities to offer valuable products and/or services.
And so on. Letting parts of your IT infrastructure bitrot has long-term consequences and companies should realize that when they make IT decisions.
It's easy enough to tell someone "you can't use Mac/Linux/IE9/FFox/etc. unless you can make a case for it," when they're not contributing to the top line. Kill arguments claiming that it will save money by asking if it will increase general support costs.
When the CFO wants to be able to access the intranet with her iPad, it's a different story.
I'm using it for running games with IE10 at http://store.craftstud.io/games/ along with Three.js and it seems to work quite well.
Luckily, those IE 9 users are less of an issue if IE 11 includes WebGL as they tend to be auto-upgraded. The IE 8 users are a harder case.
Anyone care to enlighten me as to why?
Large organizations, particularly those which train non-IT workers to follow consistent workflows like to avoid any changes. Chrome Frame was great because it was a minimally disruptive opt-in for a better web; Chrome for Business requires you to switch to Chrome for everything and whitelist legacy apps/sites – that might happen if someone at the C level is really scared about security but it's way more risk and the shops in question are among the most risk averse.
I think its time enterprise I.T managgers update their thinking, and I think the less comfortable backwards compatible tools that exist, the better.
> Google Chrome Frame is a plug-in designed for Internet Explorer based on the open-source Chromium project.
Google doesnt have to do it, but like i said thats why the c levels insist on microsoft even when their products arent anywhere near the most elegant, feature rich, or performant.
I can't speak to the emulation layers, but there are tons of verified stories about MS writing special code that actually watched the running processes and adjusted the behavior of the OS. They'd look for popular apps that utilized bugs/quirks in older version (which were remedied in new updates) and essentially emulated that bug for that one process to keep it working in the new version of Windows. Crazy, crazy stuff. Sim City was a famous example.
From Joel Spolsky: "I first heard about this from one of the developers of the hit game SimCity, who told me that there was a critical bug in his application: it used memory right after freeing it, a major no-no that happened to work OK on DOS but would not work under Windows where memory that is freed is likely to be snatched up by another running application right away. The testers on the Windows team were going through various popular applications, testing them to make sure they worked OK, but SimCity kept crashing. They reported this to the Windows developers, who disassembled SimCity, stepped through it in a debugger, found the bug, and added special code that checked if SimCity was running, and if it did, ran the memory allocator in a special mode in which you could still use memory after freeing it."
I'm no fan of MS, but that example speaks to a respectable dedication to a principle – rightly or wrongly.
As the post points out, Google Chrome does have features similar to what you describe to allow backwards-compatibility with legacy sites that need an old browser. That's not this.
People are up in arms about a free product from a company with an established track record of killing products, having nearly zero customer service and not caring about financially hurting businesses who use their tools (no-recourse account cancellations, etc.).
That's just too funny. What, you didn't know this could happen?
They close one product after another, to free all resources for something. But what?
No, even if they are open source, it isn't the same if Google retreats from the project.
Is there an open-source alternative to Chrome Frame?