Google announced today their new plugin for Internet Explorer, which will enable websites containing a special meta tag to be rendered using Chromes' rendering engine instead of Internet Explorer's.

I'm not sure how many users would actually install a plugin of this kind - but who knows, if sites intended for the plugin start prompting users to download it, they might be able to get a following.

In the blog post, the author writes "Developers can't afford to ignore IE — most people use some version of IE — so they end up spending lots of time implementing work-arounds or limiting the functionality of their apps."

I find it a bit strange that they would develop a plugin like this.. and I think it might throw a bit more fuel on the competitive fire arising between browsers. It feels a bit more like a jab at IE than a serious product.

In my opinion, though, one thing that the Internet Explorer group does need to do to stay competitive is to appear a bit more active.. With all the recent releases of Chrome and it's regular updates and improvements to rendering and performance, it appears that Chrome's development team is just able to iterate and release more often. And as a developer, that makes me more excited to use it..

I know I'd like to see IE release more frequent updates to rendering, performance, maybe even clean up the UI a bit.. but who really knows when IE 9 will be released ?