The latest Internet Explorer releases bring significant functionality improvements compared to their predecessors, but those who use older Windows versions and consequently, older IE versions, cannot benefit from these new features.
That is where Google Chrome Frame comes in. This simple plug-in is designed to bring some of the advantages of Chrome to Internet Explorer, offering the user a better browsing experience. It can integrate the latest open web technologies into your IE browser, thus making it faster and more reliable.
The main purpose of Google Chrome Frame is to help web developers take advantage of the modern technologies, such as the HTML5 canvas tag and JavaScript's recent enhancements, in order to create cutting-edge, reliable and fast web apps. Some of these features are not natively supported by Internet Explorer, especially its older versions (up to IE 9).
To create IE compliant applications using these latest techonologies, developers can enable the Google Chrome Frame for their website by adding a tag to their pages, which explicitly requests the usage of the Chrome HTML engine on machines that have this plug-in installed. Other browsers just ignore this tag, thus page rendering is not affected.
The plug-in is only activated when you are visiting websites rendered using Google Chrome's engine, thus pages that are not Google Chrome Frame enabled are displayed just the same.
Google Chrome Frame is designed to expand IE's functionality by adding it support for open web technologies and Chrome's fast rendering engine. It is a handy tool for both developers and browser users, allowing the first to create professional web apps and the latter to enjoy a better browsing experience.