I’m sure by now, if you work in web development, you’ll have heard of Google Chrome Frame. The plugin for Internet Explorer that replaces the entire rendering engine with Google Chrome, on demand.
Whilst I understand that this is a less than ideal solution, as if a user can install a plugin, they can probably replace the browser anyway. However, they released an interesting update today that makes implementation a little more feasible for site owners. You can now issue the “X-UA-Compatible” string as a HTTP response header instead of a meta tag, meaning your Chrome Frame enabled pages can validate again! It also means you can, to clients that support it, serve appropriate MIME type headers that IE does not support, such as application/xhtml+xml.
The Apache configuration snippet to enable this functionality is as follows, you’ll need mod_setenvif and mod_headers enabled to use it:
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
BrowserMatch chromeframe gcf
Header append X-UA-Compatible "chrome=1" env=gcf
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
I’ve implemented it on this server, so now any Internet Explorer visitors with Chrome Frame installed going to any of my sites, will see them as I designed them originally – in Webkit.
For more information about this update to Chrome Frame, see this blog post.
