Every web developer on earth hates Internet Explorer for a very good, very valid reason: it sucks. Suck, in fact, doesn’t even begin to encapsulate the amount pain and angst IE causes web developers on a daily basis. The amount of time that I’ve personally spent writing code to route around the indomitable suck that is IE has quite possibly added up to years at this point. Years of my life dedicated to that slow, bloated, horrible piece of garbage. (I hope I’m not underselling this because I really, REALLY hate IE.)

Invariably, some rumor will pop up that the IE team is thinking about scrapping the awful, non-compliant, slow, buggy engine that they use to render web sites and replace it with something awesome, like Gecko or Webkit. These rumors are nothing more than teases because anyone who’s tracked Microsoft for any length of time knows that it’ll be a cold day in hell before that happens.

Fortunately, Google is full of smart people who aren’t willing to wait for Microsoft to get their act together and actually pay attention to the past decade of what’s been happening on the web. So they built Google Chrome Frame, a plug-in that actually replaces Internet Explorer’s rendering engine with the one that Google Chrome uses. Consider for a moment exactly how awesome that is. It literally installs a new HTML, CSS and javascript engine inside the otherwise abysmal browser, none the wiser to the user. One line of code, a plug-in install later, and all of the sudden, you no longer have to work around IE’s cruddy box model interpretation or dog-slow Javascript engine.

I’d like to think that this is the sort of thing that web developers will embrace en masse, but the reality is the uptick will likely be slow and for specialized applications that rely on lots of front end processing. But if it takes hold, it just might mean one of the few things that truly sucks about the internet goes away for good.