HTML5 in the enterprise at last?

Published in Developers, Technology on 11 May 2011 by Craig Walker

Google I/O is currently playing out in San Francisco right now. It’s always an interesting event with lots of new Google products and tools, though this year there have been few announcements which have caught my eye. Till now.

Alex Russell from Google announced today that Google Chrome Frame, the plugin to IE6, IE7 and IE8 which allows users that can’t move away from these older versions of IE to enjoy the modern browsing experience of Chrome, will soon be available as an admin-less install!

Basically right now you need administrative rights on your PC to install Google Chrome Frame. Most users working in larger businesses don’t have those rights so they’re stuck with the browser they’ve got. But soon they won’t. This means if you’re currently shackled into using older versions of Internet Explorer with no way to upgrade or switch to a different browser, you will be able to install Google Chrome Frame without any issue, enabling products like Xero to work at their very best. (Though why enterprises that still require IE6 for legacy apps can’t run IE6 and another browser like Chrome or Firefox as well, still baffles me).

This is big news.

Could this mean the end of the enterprise holding back modern web development? We shall see – but at Xero we applaud Google for continuing to push the web forward for those that are being held back. Well done Google!

6 comments

alex
11 May 2011 #

“enabling products like Xero to work at their very best”, does that mean you are testing xero against chrome now?, quite a while back i asked support@xero and chrome wasn’t really supported. its just there are a couple of chrome specific bugs i have noticed in the ui, which i haven’t bothered to report as of yet

Craig Walker
11 May 2011 #

Really? Chrome is the browser we recommend the most to our users (though Firefox 4 is excellent too). Can you send those bugs through to support@xero for us to look at?

Craig

Nigel
12 May 2011 #

That’s interesting. Why do you recommend Chrome in particular, Craig?

Wayne Pollock
12 May 2011 #

Alex, we have been running Chrome and Xero for the past 12+ months. No bugs to report. Just the fastest browser delivering the best on-line accounting app ever. Why anyone would use anything else beats me.

Craig Walker
12 May 2011 #

Google Chrome has consistently been the fastest, most secure and easy to use browsers on the market for quite some time. It’s hard to make something like a browser any better than any other browser – other than under-the-hood magic (like a fast and standards compliant renderer or an amazing JavaScript engine) – yet Chrome has managed to do it with innovations like tabs on top or the integrated url and search bar (notice how these have been copied by every other browser over the last couple of years).

From Xero’s point of view we always recommend using the latest browser no matter which one you prefer. However we do strongly recommend using either Mozilla Firefox or Google Chrome – you will get the best experience with Xero (or in fact any web application such as Google Docs) using these browsers.

What’s interesting is that Google has announced their Chromebook to be released in June: http://youtu.be/TVqe8ieqz10. This is a laptop that essentially just runs Chrome – that’s it. And because all new platforms must have a killer app – Angry Birds for the web was also just released: http://chrome.angrybirds.com

Fun times for the web!

Craig

Vaughan Rowsell
19 May 2011 #

At Vend we are big fans of Chrome and recommend it to our users as our browser of choice. We used to recommend Firefox until just recently. Google and Chrome seem to be heading in the right direction with HTML5, speed and security.

Would be nice to get our hands on a Chromebook too.

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