Google planning Chrome Frame for Firefox?

2 October 2009 10:11 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Google could easily crank out a Chrome Frame for Firefox, in the same way that it has for Internet Explorer, according to Mozilla's VP Engineering, Mike Shaver. "The code is certainly there", he told Computerworld.

"But source code doesn't speak to intent", he added, indicating that he doesn't know whether such a plugin is in development at Google. The frame, which launched on 23 September for Internet Explorer, allows IE users to use the speedy WebKit rendering engine that Chrome itself uses.

Google has admitted that it launched Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer because it wasn't worth the time and bother to make Google Wave work nicely in IE6, which doesn't support HTML5 standards.

However, given that Firefox - and other browsers like Opera - support these standards, there'd be no need for Google to make Chrome Frame for those platforms, except for completeness' sake.

Shaver hopes that won't come to fruition: "I'd be unpleasantly surprised if Google did do a [Firefox] plug-in". "We wouldn't want Google to do for us what they did for Microsoft".

Via: news.idg.no

Full tags

Software, Online, Google, Firefox, Mozilla Foundation, Microsoft, Chrome, Google Chrome Frame, Browsers