Internet Explorer, particularly versions 6 and before, are the bane of any web developer's existence. The Internet Explorer versions Microsoft produced during the competion-free era between when Netscape died and Firefox came on the scene are masterpieces of monopolistic neglect. IE 5 and IE6 are slow, proprietary and just plain awful to work with.

Worst of all, Microsoft guaranteed themselves longtime domination of the corporate browser market through this cynical behavior because all the web apps built for IE 5 and 6 are so full of hacks that they won't run on "modern" browsers!

Nothing strikes fear into the heart of our professional services team quite like the words: "yeah, we're thinking about rolling out IE 7 sometime in the next 18 months."

But now there is a way out of the nightmare that is IE. Alex Russell at Google (of Dojo Toolkit fame) has figured out a way to run Chrome as a plug-in inside of IE

- even the old versions. This means that web developers can build applications the way nature intended and IE is none the wiser.

For cloud computing in general and Platform as a Service in particular, this is great news. With Platform as a Service (PaaS), you develop and deploy apps from within your browser, so the power of the browser directly governs the power of the your development platform.

For WaveMaker and other PaaS vendors, this extends the reach of our cloud computing solutions to the back hinterlands of corporate America where technological change comes most slowly and where consequently frustration with IT is highest.

Read the original blog entry...