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Google Brings Chrome Renderer, Speedy Javascript To IE

Posted by kdawson on from the behind-enemy-lines dept.

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.

6 of 239 comments (clear)

  1. Don't stop now! by Aphoxema · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?"
  2. Re:Why by Aphoxema · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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?"
  3. W3C Working Draft by tepples · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:W3C Working Draft by weston · · Score: 4, Insightful

      That's not implying all of them are. IE is only supporting finished standards.

      This might be a credible statement if Microsoft actually had a reasonable track record of supporting finished standards.

      And if so many other organizations with notably smaller pools of resources hadn't managed to run circles around them over the last 5-7 years, not only supporting "unfinished" standards but doing a better job at implementing the finished ones.

      Whatever is going on with IE can't be reasonably explained by stating that they're sticking with finished standards.

      Between that and Microsoft's well-known history, one has to wonder why any intelligent person would actually even be able to forward that as an explanation of choice.

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  4. Re:So, Basically.. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    Prediction: when YouTube dumps Flash, the new 'YouTube installer' is this.

    --
    My God, it's Full of Source!
    OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
  5. Excuses, excuses... by weston · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

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