The announcement of Google Chrome Frame – an Internet Explorer extension that embeds a Google Chrome browser into Internet Explorer – could sarcastically be called the “making of an IE which fully supports open standards for the first time”! If you haven’t heard of Google Chrome Frame, here is the description from the project website:
Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome’s open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:
- Start using open web technologies – like the HTML5 canvas tag – right away, even technologies that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
- Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.
How can Chrome Frame be enabled for existing web pages?
To start using Google Chrome Frame, all developers need to do is to add a single tag:
<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”chrome=1″>When Google Chrome Frame detects this tag it switches automatically to using Google Chrome’s speedy WebKit-based rendering engine. It’s that easy. For users, installing Google Chrome Frame will allow them to seamlessly enjoy modern web apps at blazing speeds, through the familiar interface of the version of IE that they are currently using.
Adding the meta tag to my blog, I could instantly run the OpenLaszlo JavaScript/HTML5/CSS demos I’ve built in the past months in IE! This video shows an IE8/Chrome Frame running an HTML5 demo:
As a result, many company employees with access to IE only - and latest stats show that still 25% of Internet users browser the web with IE6 – suffer from the extremely bad performance of that browser. In the corporate environment companies still report up to 40% IE6 users.
An interesting development could be witnessed last year. In September 2008 Google announced, that they worked closely with Microsoft to get better performance in IE6 for the Gmail application:
Last October, we launched a rewritten code base for the Gmail user interface to Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 2 users. Since then, we’ve added support for Safari 3 and Firefox 3 and improved performance in other browsers. ….
The newest version of Gmail pushes modern browser technology to the limit, so initially we weren’t able to make it available to those of you who use IE6. Because it was released way back in 2001, IE6 wasn’t able to handle the complexity of the new code in a way that met our performance and stability goals. Over the last few months, we’ve been working with the IE engineers at Microsoft to address these issues: they released a critical update to their JavaScript implementation that fixed a performance problem with how the script engine allocates and frees memory.
By the end of September Google sent out a completely different message, as was reported by TG Daily:
Taking a page out of Apple’s book, Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service “twice as fast.” Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it fails to run some Gmail features.
As far as I can say there was no official announcement by Google, but who would doubt that the decision might be connected to the fact that Google Chrome 1.0 was released in December. What a strange timing – announcing cooperation with Microsoft to improve IE6 performance in September, and 3 months later tell your user to upgrade to a more modern browser instead. Would be interesting to hear what happened between Google and Microsoft within this short period of time.
Meanwhile companies start utilizing the massively improved performance of JavaScript engines of Chrome, Firefox and Webkit, as TG Daily reports:
Fast JavaScript engines and greater compatibility with web standards have become Chrome’s and Firefox’s biggest selling points over IE this year. In the corporate world, these benefits could turn into decisive reasons for companies to ditch IE. Some business software vendors have begun tweaking their web applications for Chrome’s speedy V8 engine, resulting in a dramatic speed gains. For example, a Chrome-optimized version of the Recruiting CRM software delivers a 300% performance increase in complex queries.
In July 2009 Google discontinued the support for IE6 in Youtube. IE6 users see a message saying: “We’ll be phasing out support for your browser soon…”, as Ajaxian and others reported. Companies can probably live with the fact, that your user experience won’t be as good if you visit Youtube with an IE6 at work. But for Google Apps functionality – switching from Microsoft to Google Docs – that’s a whole different story.
Google Chrome Frame and Korea – dealing with a 60% IE6 market share
There has been a country where we could see an approach similar to Chrome Frame: South Korea, with the difference that over there Firefox has an embedded IE which is used depending on which website/domain you visit. The reason for using IE is, that most of the secure Internet communication in South Korea is enabled by use of ActiveX plug-ins (the Korean government required companies to offer 128bit encryption, when the export of that technology was forbidden by the Clinton administration; as a solution Koreans developed their own encryption powered by ActiveX). And what happens in a country, where Firefox had a market share of less than 1% in 2007, totally dominated by IE (around 98%)? Gen Kanai of Mozilla in Asia reported:
In IE 7 and in Vista, Microsoft has re-architected Active X controls in such a way to make them “more safe” by requiring a user action for the control to run. This is obviously impacting every web site and company that uses active X controls on their websites, which include just about every website in Korea that handles any kind of secure transaction. Every online bank, every governmental agency, every ecommerce site. Without enough time to re-architect Korean websites, 3 S. Korean governmental ministries, the Ministry of Information and Communication, the Ministry of Government Administration and Home Affairs, and the Financial Supervisory Service, warned S. Korean users that upgrading to Vista would disable the user from making any secure transaction online.
Gen Kanai’s report is from 2007, but IE6 is still a hot topic in Korea, as you can tell by this article published this week by the Korea Times, titled “Korea paying price for Microsoft monoculture”:
“There are much better technologies out there, but Active-X has left us stuck at Windows XP and IE6,” said Channy Yun, an official from Daum (www.daum.net), the country’s second-largest Web portal, and also the local leader of the Mozilla foundation, a non-profit organization promoting the Firefox Web browser. …
Active-X usage became a hot topic again in July when a massive Internet attack left more than 80,000 Korean computers crippled. It was pointed out that Active-X provided an easy route for cyber criminals spreading the malware for the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. …
Another problem with Active-X is that it is prolonging the life of IE6, the sixth revision of Microsoft’s Web browser that was introduced in 2001. The antiquated browser doesn’t support key Web standards, which makes it difficult for developers to design more sophisticated Web pages that are compatible with other browsers. …
However, the IE6 share in Korea is close to 60 percent, according to local Web analytics firm, Internet Trend, as companies are reluctant to go through the trouble to test and reprogram their Active-X entangled Web pages for newer browsers. So it’s easy to imagine Korean users waking up one day and experiencing difficulties in watching YouTube videos.
If Microsoft should ever disappear or get swallowed by Google, I’m sure going to miss stories like this about IE6, ActiveX and Vista craziness! And to the Korean web industry: maybe Chrome Frame can solve some of your problems, at least enabling companies to build open standards based web applications that can rendered inside IE through Chrome – even it is an IE6!
Update: According to tests run by Computerworld, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) with the plug-in was 9.6 times faster than IE8 on its own. Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite three times each for IE8 with Chrome Frame, and IE8 without the plug-in, then averaged the scores.
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