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Microsoft Says Google Chrome Frame Makes IE Less Secure
Mark writes "The release of Google Chrome Frame, a new open source plugin that injects Chrome's renderer and JavaScript engine into Microsoft's browser, earlier this week had many web developers happily dancing long through the night. Finally, someone had found a way to get Internet Explorer users up to speed on the Web. Microsoft, on the other hand, is warning IE users that it does not recommend installing the plugin. What does the company have against the plugin? It makes Internet Explorer less secure. 'With Internet Explorer 8, we made significant advancements and updates to make the browser safer for our customers,' a Microsoft spokesperson told Ars. 'Given the security issues with plugins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plugin has doubled the attack area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.'"
I know. Ho hum. Someone tell Microsoft to wake me up when they get around to actually making a decent browser. How many years has it been? 13 years?
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Of course it doubles the attack rate of malicious scripts... It makes Javascript run twice as fast.
In other news, Microsoft has said that Moores Law is a security risk, because viruses can install themselves twice as fast every 18 months.
You just made one of the most important arguments against Silverlight official.
So... forcing the .NET plug-in on Firefox users was OK, but a voluntary add-on from Google is a security risk? Good to know.
Google has a horrible history with security?
Perhaps you don't remember, but IE 5 was LIGHTYEARS ahead of Netscape.
Great, that happened *ten* years ago. What has happened since? They've been chasing the Fox for past *five* years.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
"Microsoft pretends IE could possibly be made less secure by changing anything about it."
..is scared.
So Microsoft, how does it feel? How does it feel to have a big bad company with a near monopoly in one market (Google in search) threaten your stake in a different market (browsers)?
FAQs are evil.
By running this plugin, you would be exposing yourself to not only Possible IE exploits, but possible Chrome Exploits as well. It would be much safer to run the Chrome browser standalone since it reduces the attack surface. It would probably be faster standalone too.
In Soviet Russia, Trojan exploits YOU!
Inciteful as the statement is, it's true... There's no way it can be false. A browser containing IE's engine *and* WebKit has all the security holes from both, and all the security holes gained in pushing one into the other.
It's also true for any plug in you use in IE. I'm curious if MS would say the same about Flash, Java, etc? Because they all introduce their own security problems in IE in a similar way as Chrome Frame. The fact that MS is singling out Chrome Frame says more about how MS feels about Google than it does about the security of their browser.