Give your web applications a speedboost and HTML5 compatibility boost in Internet Explorer

With the accelerating emergence of mobile devices HTML5 takes centre stage. While the first round of the " browser wars 2.0" was all about speed, the second round is about HTML5 compatibility and behaviour. With the dominance of Android and iOS in the mobile market Microsoft's Internet Explorer isn't the gold standard for browsers anymore, the test results rather show IE as trying to catch up. Furthermore, since it isn't a standard if it doesn't allow for divergent interpretation, Microsoft implements HTML5 features different than the rest, creating a headache for developers. The irony in the whole situation is, that Microsoft won " browser wars 1.0" because the implemented HTML more faithful that its then competitors.
Quite some organisations claim (with various levels of credibility) to be stuck/standardised on IE (which I usually reply to with: "Interesting, what version of IE is running on your CEO's iPad?"), so you can't use all the new fancy stuff you could use on the mobile devices (until Windows Phone7 becomes popular and the "IE does it differently" headache starts on mobile). Luckily there is a cure: Chrome Frame. It installs inside IE and doesn't load any pages until you tell it so. So all the legacy code can still run with IE, but your new stuff uses Chrome's webkit rendering engine, solves a lot of XPages/Dojo headaches too. There are a few steps to get going:

1. Add <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1"> to your HTML head section. This will ensure Chrome Frame is activated when rendering your page. If all of your applications on your (Domino) server should use it, you also can use a HTTP header (that's the web/Internet Sites section in the Domino directory) X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1
2. Add discovery and download options to your page(s)
3. If you are the system administrator, you want to download the MSI Installer and push it out (I like OCS Inventory for that). Make sure you read the admin guide

You can install it now. As usual YMMV.