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.

However, Google has now announced that it will be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6, starting with Google Apps as early as March 1st. Google Mail and their other properties will also phase out support shortly afterwards. This strikes me as the moment that Google has decided that IE6 market share is no longer big enough to allow it to hold back progress any longer. This announcement is big enough that it’s one of the top three stories on the BBC News homepage.

So one question comes up. Does this mean that we, as regular every day web developers, can finally drop support for Internet Explorer 6 in our own work? My site doesn’t work in the browser currently, but purely due to laziness on my part, can I now say that actually, it never will? It feels like it could be that moment.