Essentially, Chrome Frame replaces all of the guts of IE with Chrome technologies. This extends beyond the rendering engine – it replaces the JavaScript engine as well, and whatever other parts needed swapping out. Using Chrome Frame, IE can immediately start to render HTML5 (canvas, audio, video), CSS3, and more. Even better, under Chrome Frame, all IE rendering quirks would cease to be an issue. Oh yeah, and it also makes IE faster – ten times faster for JavaScript performance, even in this beta stage.

To utilize Chrome Frame on your site, all that is needed is a single meta tag – if Chrome Frame is installed, IE will use it, and if not, the page will still render. This is very nice, unobtrusive behavior indeed.

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

Google developed Chrome Frame primarily for their upcoming Google Wave communication software. It probably became quickly evident to Google that they would never be able to offer the rich functionality that Wave requires under IE. I would expect that the release of Chrome Frame is ruffling some feathers at Microsoft – Google seems to be getting on the nerves of some it’s major tech competitors lately using similar tactics. Still, it’s hard to see how consumers lose with this move – to some extent, it’s the best thing that could happen to Internet Explorer.

Xenocode is one of the new breed of virtualization companies. A distinct difference between Xenocode and other virtualization companies is that they specialize in application virtualization instead of the more popular OS-level virtualization. It all seems to work like magic – hitero difficult to multi-instance programs can be run as independent, click-once-and-run application.

Xenocode does application-level virtualization in an ingenious way. Their virtualization software creates a sandbox environment that contains internal representations of system resources, such as a file system and a registry. Targeted calls are passed to the host OS so actions like saving files locally still work, too. On top of all this, virtualized program download and execution can be kicked off via Firefox through a plugin.

What’s the point of all this? The single greatest innovation that’s come out of this is virtualization of IE 6 (and many other popular browsers and software). Now, there’s no particular need to run zany configurations or schemes in order to run IE 6 – no virtual machine, no dual install, no backup PC. This is a wonderful tool for web developers who need to check their work in IE 6, amongst others.

The Clickstart app only works on Windows PCs for now, but it’s a tremendous achievement in software development. Try it out, it’s simply amazing.