If you haven’ heard yet there is a new browser in town. Like a mutant cyborg from the future built with used parts from the past the “IE-Chrome” browser has leapt to life. So there has been much talk back and forth over the past day in regards to what this will do for the old browser IE 6 that is the bane of most peoples existences in the development world.
Packaged as a plug-in for Internet Explorer, Chrome Frame brings the partial rendering engine and JavaScript engine of Google Chrome inside Internet Explorer. Mainly this adds Chrome’s JavaScript engine and support for HTML 5 – what this leads to in future, we’ll have to wait and see.
So if your keen to try it out on your dated Internet Explorer installation, then why not give it a try – simply head over to http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ and grab yourself the plug-in.
Why Bother?
“… Why bother – Everyone should just upgrade to Firefox…”
This release from Google has set tongues wagging both for it and against it. Some question whether this may prolong the never ending battle for developers that is known as IE 6 and prolong its life in enterprise environments where upgrades have happened at snails pace.
Others think it will be great to allow the suffering users users (poor souls?) access to the promise land. Your take on this i think will really depend on what your use your browser for, if you are not using an alternative already and if your involved in the web development at large. I’m under the understanding that Google has released this to help with uptake of its new service Wave, which should be coming to a browser near you soon.
One thing that you should note right away is that Chrome Frame will only fire its rendering goodies if it has a special tag in the page. If this tag is not there, then you’ll be looking through your IE goggles still. This is good in some ways bad in others (why not have it turned on by default?), but as i mentioned above, this probably leads to being a main usage case for Google’s services in the future.
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
There's another way to forcibly test a page, though, and that's by including "cf:" in front of the URL. We used this for our tests.
Example: cf:http://www.diaryofaninja.com
Quick look at my current setup
So I thought lets install it and give it a try.
Sadly (only for the purposes of this test) i have Internet Explorer 8 installed not IE 6 although as the plug-in is designed for all Internet Explorer installations i can still install and use it.
I use Firefox almost exclusively for everything but verifying things work in IE (I'm a very lucky back-end developer and my company employs many HTML gunslingers to make sure things still look good for me… how la-dee-da do I feel).
The major thing that Chrome is good at (and i think what the folks at Google want the new plug-in used for) is processing JavaScript really fast, so I’m going to run the SunSpider test on my IE 8 install and then again with chrome frame installed. As i don't know of any sites that will be including the tag above i think JavaScript speed should be an easy test piece.
My Internet Explorer 8 had a result of 5484.8ms
Installation
In only a few easy steps, i simply logged onto the chrome frame Google code site @ http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/ clicked on install, agreed to one of Google’s not-so-“Do no evil” EULA’s and i was away.
And again from the top…
So lets see what happens now i have the plug-in installed. I pointed at the same address with the cf: in-front of the start URL.
With Chrome Frame installed my new result is: 525ms
Now that’s a “l33t h4x0r” mod that everyone should have.
So there you have it kids – if you want Chrome’s performance but can’t upgrade yet because yous Sys Admin won’t allow it – Install Chrome Frame.