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Google Brings Chrome Renderer, Speedy Javascript To IE
A month after we discussed Google's bringing SVG to IE, several readers let us know that Google is expanding the beachhead by offering Chrome's renderer and speedy Javascript execution in an IE plugin. This effort is in service of allowing IE to participate in Google Wave when that technology's preview is extended in a week's time. The plugin, currently in an early stage of development, is called Google Chrome Frame.
and IE?
...if Google is going to pull the embrace, extend and extinguish routine on Microsoft. I hope I live to see that day.
Ballmer must be about ready to throw the *desk* this time. Google is taking the initiative to 'fix' their competing product. The plot thickens!
Funny may not give karma, but +5 Informative never made anyone snort coffee out their nose.
Lipstick on a pig
But in this case, instead of a beautiful dame, this frames crap. So I guess this is more like a frameset.
Uh, that's great. Too bad all of those other Windows things will still be using the IE embedded mode.
I'd use this new browser to watch Steve's fit when hears google is subverting IE.
Google are taking the matter into their own hands and actually putting resources towards improving IE, because they know that MS will not do it in any reasonable way.
...Is there an ongoing "my Javascript is faster than yours ha-ha" competition in the browser market? When looking for a browser, it isn't just speed people are looking for; They want security, add-ons, customization, and things alike.
If I want top speed, I'll use chrome. If I want an all-around great browser, I'll use Firefox.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
Google: When Microsoft's implementation of Microsoft's browser just isn't enough.
I wonder how many people can foresee what this will lead to in a year or two. (Hint: Google Labs is nice this time of year)
Last I checked, webkit browsers other than Chrome for Windows have some pretty hefty security holes and dire vulnerabilities. The question is whether google is dropping in a tiny webkit panel or a full chrome instance within this tab. Their implementation here is very important because they may end up simply shattering IE 8's security model and leaving an exploitable hole in users' systems.
Google better take this very seriously before advertising this on their search and mail pages, etc.
I think I see Google starting a new tag... "letmefixthatforyou"
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Sup Dawg we heard you liked AJAX so we put a browser in yo' browser so you can browse while you browse
Chromed.
</zaboo>
Save the Music; Save the World at http://www.TuneTriever.com (Our latest Android game)
First they ignore you..
Then they laugh at you...
Then you make plugins for their browser.
Toyota putting its engines in fords
Britannca putting its articles in Wikipedia
Fox newss on CNN
It's like seeing someone show up at a party in some hideous disco outfit thinking they are still the coolest thing.
Only retards still use that stinking pile of fail that is Firefox. Or people with such low standards that they don't care about being forced to restart their browser multiple times a day to clear out the massive resource leaks the idiots working on Firefox can't ever fix due to the archaic single threaded/single address space problem.
Chrome + memory protected tabs + the fastest multi-threaded Javascript makes Firefox look as bad as Mozilla did compared to IE years ago.
It's the 8 hours a week that really powers Google's innovation. For those who don't know, Google employees are supposed to dedicate 8 hours a week of company time to some personal project. Those 8 hours have been responsible for Docs, gMail, Maps, Earth, code search, scholar search, etc., etc. People have ideas, give your employees a chance to explore them a bit and you might be surprised what they come up with on their own.
Man, I don't know what I'll do if I grow up in a world of portable PP presentations and JS based sites.
Anyway, regarding the Ebay thing I know how long sites like that take to long...even with the 20/10 FIOS internet my house has.
Adblock+ and NoScript is win :)
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
I don't buy all the google hype- but its a sad day for mighty Microsoft when another company has to improve i.e.
Google is the wind beneath my wings.
Adblock+ and NoScript is win :)
I concur, but it's a depressing state that it should ever even be necessary to add to the work necessary to do less work in a realm where usability should be paramount.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
HTML 5 is not done yet by any means. I wouldn't even say they have what you might call a working draft.
In Firefox, this page shows "W3C Working Draft" along the left side.
Microsoft isn't necessarily behind so much as they are not working off the Mozilla and Apple webkit mailing lists when they implement features to their browser.
A lot of the features that Acid3 tests aren't new proposals in any sense; they've been around for years. WebKit (basis for Chrome and Safari), Gecko (Firefox and SeaMonkey), and Presto (Opera) all score above 90/100, which handily beats IE 8's 20/100.
"IE isn't done till Frame won't run."
Yuppers.
The only people I could see using this are people who aren't allowed to install / use a different web browser. And I highly doubt IT departments that don't allow third party browsers will allow this plugin to be installed. So this seems like a gigantic waste of time.
Firefox apologists:
"Unless you browse the internet non-stop, all day, this won't be a problem."
IE apologists:
"Unless you browse dangerous sites, this won't be a problem."
The irony is hilarious.
I wonder how many people can foresee what this will lead to in a year or two.
Google = Black Mesa??? o.O
Google is working on these plugins to ensure their platform has the broadest install-base and give them a way to influence current or future compatibility issues.
This is a pretty smart move for them to maintain and grow their reach. Also - as long as they keep their plug-ins open - a positive move for whole web-app, software as a service 'movement'. (I'm not sure if it's considered a 'movement').
Boy, the people at Microsoft must be pissed about this. When Bill Gates "discovered" the internet back in 1994, the first thing he realized is that eventually people were going want to replace Microsoft desktop software with programs that run on the web.
So Microsoft's strategy ever since then has been cripple IE to keep that from happening. That's why IE innovation came to a screeching halt once IE crushed Netscape. And that's why IE runs javascript so poorly, it's not due to bad programing, it's a strategic decision.
Now Google comes up with a new technology, Wave, that out-performs a whole slew of desktop applications, and to help it out adds a plug-in that uncripples IE. What do you bet there will be an IE update in a few weeks that blocks it?
what does this have to do with sarah palin?
Where I hope it will lead to, is that Google Chrome will export COM interfaces to its various components (like the frame as it seems to be doing in the article, or the wonderful search bar) in a way that would make it possible to hack up a Chrome tailored to your own needs with minimal effort, or perhaps to use its display engine to show HTML in applications, which is now primarily done using the WebBrowser control, that is to say IE.
IE's not done till Chrome won't run!
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
First, sneak your interface into the browser, then you could change the Windows desktop environment, then change the kernel and before you know it we're running 100% open source software.
Google are taking the matter into their own hands and actually putting resources towards improving IE, because they know that MS will not do it in any reasonable way.
Yeah, in other words, pretty much what everybody else has been doing over the last decade with their collection of hacks, their CSS reset sheets, and their javascript libraries.
One wonders what the cost of the lost productivity involved in working with the deliberately broken portions of Microsoft's software is... or how much more productive the industry as a whole would be if IE faded away...
Tweet, tweet.
This whole thing should be very embarrassing for Microsoft... but apparently it isn't. Microsoft is co-sponsoring a conference about SVG, which is being held in Google's Mountain View complex, of all places. That in itself is disturbing enough, but to think that the one company that's prevented SVG from gaining traction on the web is now pretending to be interested in SVG (as opposed to promoting their Silverlight tool as the only *real* solution) is, excuse me, fucked up.
If they really want to help the advancement of SVG, they should finally release a browser which implements it natively. Apparently every other browser vendor can do it. For IE, at the moment, we have to rely on a fragile JavaScript/Flash workaround provided by Google.
I'm really not ranting about Microsoft just for the fun of it; I'm usually pragmatic, bordering on stoic. But I (like many others here) have spent weeks and months trying to work around Microsoft products' shortcomings, and this kind of hypocrisy is making me angry.
CJ
Ah, arrogance and stupidity, all in the same package. How efficient of you. -- Londo Mollari
... if Google Chrome will become something like this or this some day? I mean, it will expose all cookies, history and stuff including all your pr0n when people use IE to surf Google?
This is interesting. I wonder if it can run IE plugins (eg. COM objects). The lack of plugin support in Chrome is a huge issue right now. Sometimes, especially for intranet stuff, you need to access some "other" functionality through a browser plugin (using COM in IE and npruntime in practically everything else).
HTML 5 is not done yet by any means. I wouldn't even say they have what you might call a working draft.
"The publication of this document by the W3C as a W3C Working Draft ...".
(And the first public working draft was published Jan 2008).
Microsoft isn't necessarily behind so much as they are not working off the Mozilla and Apple webkit mailing lists when they implement features to their browser.
I don't work off these lists either, but I'm aware of a numer of high profile parts of it, say, the Canvas element. I'm sure Microsoft is too.
IE still has a very enterprise-oriented development cycle
Is this what we call their six year hiatus from actually working on their product?
In the late 1990s they showed they were quite capable of aggressively expanding IE's features, including new if raggedly incomplete support for emerging standards, when they decided it was in their interest to do it.
the bleeding edge feature explosion we see in most open source browsers.
A lot of the features discussed for HTML 5 have had visible implementations for 3-4 years. You could call them bleeding edge in 2006, maybe 2007. 2009? Not without looking pretty silly.
I don't think IE needs to catch up so much as Microsoft simply needs to release an unstable browser in addition to their platform browser if they want to compete with the rest of the non-standard "standards" cult.
The competing products seem to do just fine at keeping a comparable level of stability along with the pushing the envelope. In fact, given how much Opera, Mozilla, and Safari, have been able to do with resources that are orders of magnitude smaller, there's really no excuse.
Except of course if you're talking about CSS 2.1, where it is the best.
Can you defend this claim? Because based on my experiences *using* CSS over the last 7 years, there hasn't been a time when any version of IE could even claim they weren't maddeningly, brokenly worse.
Tweet, tweet.
This is Google at its best, IE is the lowers common denominator when it comes to browsers and Microsoft knows it.
Microsoft is not fixing IE to slow Google down in the WebApp space.
This is Google's shots across the bowel. Basically fix Microsoft or we will.
Chrome was shot one, develop a browser that's half done.
That does the things IE can not do, speed and standards.
This is shot two, A plugin which users hate installing, I need a plugin to use Google Wave? How come I don't need it with Firefox,Chrome,etc?
I bet this will be heavy on Google branding just to rub it in.
Shot three ChromeOS, This is just to piss off Microsoft, Google is becoming Microsoft to beat Microsoft, A one stop solution for software and the OS is just the perfectly integrated tool.(I know this was announced before the plugin)
Google are stepping on all of Microsoft's toes, browser, mail, OS, Office.
It's the marketing war of the century and Google hates Microsoft, the only other company I have seen with a blind hatred of Microsoft was Sun, but Google could win.
Google is the Do No Evil, relaxed, community giving, freebie galore, cool web tools company.
While Microsoft is the stuffy, evil empire,broken software,lax security,uninventive company.
Microsoft took out IBM and Google will take out Microsoft (offcourse they will live on is some form or another, but a shadow of their former self's)
Microsoft is the new IBM big, blotted, slow thinking, and Google is the new Microsoft a small company with inventive ideas.
Google will become the next evil empire and in 15 years Google will be on the road to a slow death at the hand on a new company.
It plays out like a Greek myth, The father will kill the son and so on.....
IE is only supporting finished standards.
SVG was a finished recommendation before IE 7, yet Internet Explorer 8 doesn't display SVG without a plug-in.
Can they make a javascript interpreter to embed in my dogs crap?
We heard you like browsers, so we put a browser in your browser so you can render while you render...
> Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in
But where can I get the source code of the plugin itself? (I mean, not the rendering engine for this plugin, but the IE plugin part that glues it to IE)
Can't find it in the Google Code page.
Ubuntu Chromium Daily Build, currently very usable.
Any developer used to the routine of cutting down the fancy features of a site to fit the stupid box model pattern adopted by the trident renderer should be grateful to google for this move.
The javascript issue is very welcome also for the ones surprised by the nonsense of the inconsistency of DOM manipulations gifted by the IE8 engine.
If we are welcoming a new behemoth, at least it will bring better software.
Now if only they bundle this with manufactures.
I'm amazed that nobody else has commented on how huge a deal this is. Microsoft are *not* going to be happy.
Google have basically said that it's too much of a nuisance to develop for IE. They want to focus their development on a single web platform, and released a tool to allow them to do that.
But what nobody seems to be mentioning is how this could transform the browser wars. If Google take the logical next step of releasing this as a general purpose development tool, there's no need to develop for IE any more. Web developers can just optimize for Chrome and run the code on either browser. And that negates Microsoft's advantage of having the dominant browser, it breaks the vicious circle that is Microsoft's browser monopoly:
Microsoft's 90% hold on desktop browsers -> Developers have to focus on IE -> Users and corporations use IE
With Googles plugin, that 90% hold on the desktop becomes far less relevant. Google can give developers the choice of developing for their browser, without reducing the available user base. After all, Microsoft have spent years training users to install any ActiveX control a website needs, what end user isn't going to trust a plugin from Google? :-)
This gives the market the freedom to choose to develop for Google Chrome without worrying about Microsoft's majority share on the desktop.
And make no mistake, that's huge.
I wonder what percentage of IE6 users have the authority to install an ActiveX control on their system.
FireFox have like serious issues when dealing with JavaScript. I use it in Windows and Linux, just awful for some stuff i use.
For example, try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji
If you try to sort by the first column for example (#), in Firefox it just stops responding and CPU is at 100%. This happens in Windows and Linux.
If i use Chrome, it takes maybe 2-3 seconds to sort everything? Even using the development snapshot in Linux for Chrome, just works, fast. So it is not the OS but the implementation in the JavaScript engine. I clearly see the improvement in other sites using AJAX and the like.
This sort of course is using JavaScript. And i doubt it is performance issues as i use an AMD Phenom II X4 955 which is a Quad-Core running at 3.2ghz and 4gb RAM. I really think that is ENOUGH processing power to sort around 2000 rows in a table.
"FireFox have like serious issues when dealing with JavaScript. I use it in Windows and Linux, just awful for some stuff i use. For example, try kangi If you try to sort by the first column for example (#), in Firefox it just stops responding and CPU is at 100%. This happens in Windows and Linux"
I just tried it in FF under Ubuntu running off a USB device and - not a problem - it sorted in just over a second. Where Java is problematical, it's usually a slow or buggy site, where everything is stuck waiting on a javascript to finish. That's why I use noscript.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.
If they slip this plugin with every Googleware installer 'in order for your computer to work with the software' then it's golden.
Here be signatures
I agree with the other response here. I'm running Ubuntu on a somewhat elderly laptop (AMD Turion, 2 meg RAM)... and it took approximately 3 seconds for Firefox 3.0.14 to sort your table. I don't know what your machine's issue might be.
Regardless, if you're unhappy with Firefox for any reason, real or imagined, then why use it? I think the whole point of this Google plugin is to "liberate" people who are trapped with IE due to company policy, or due to being too computer-illiterate to download an alternative browser. However, if a person is using Firefox already than neither of those two concerns apply... so there's no point in releasing a version for Firefox. If you like Chrome, and trust Google's handling of your data (this is the hang-up for me), then just use that and enjoy.
Prepare for unforeseen consequences ;)
"A lot of the fancy shit you see on the internet today is javascript, the reason much of it wasn't there before was because javascript was so damn intensive to execute."
Hell... NO!.
We use to avoid javascript for everything, but "decoration", so everything still work if a guy has javascript off.
Nowdays javascript is considered more or less "standard", and theres much more interesting that can be done with it, thanks to CSS and the AJAX object.
So using javascript NOW make sense, but using javascript a few years ago was a bad idea. Is still a bad idea to make a website depends on javascript for the sake of it. As there are people out here with NoScript and stuff. But nowdays we have tools and strategies to make websites with javascript and working for these people.
-Woof woof woof!
"Libertarianism: Rich wolves and poor sheep deciding who to have for dinner"
Fixed that for ya.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
I just went and installed it (stuck w/ IE here by fiat), and see no difference whatsoever. From a quick reading of the avilable docs, it looks like their renderer just sits there in the background twiddling its thumbs unless it hits a website with the special "Google, save me!" tag embedded in it.
Unless and until a large percentage of the web chucks the "Google, save me!" tag into their pages, this isn't liable to affect you as a user. However, it is nice for web developers, as they can now "support" IE by checking for support of the tag, and kicking IE users without it to the Chrome plugin install page.
I'm posting this with the cf:http://tech.slashdot.org url. (I'm using the Google Frame plugin in IE8).
I used the cf: on acid3 and 100% wow !!! This is destabilizing !! :-)
Now i tested my banking account site that usually work only with IE and have issues with Google Chrome. So in entered the cf: and accessed my site and was able to make some account payment with it. Great. And fast.
This is the kind of test we need to make to full-proof this plugin.