Improve Internet Explorer with Google chrome frame

Google just released a preview of Chrome Frame, a plug-in for Internet Explorer. It improves IE ‘s javascript capabilities and make it compatible with the new HTML 5.

This sounds very promising for corporate environments where IE 6 is required.

Read the announcement on the developer blog and download the plug-in on the Google Chrome Frame page.

Our rapid benchmark shows 60 x acceleration !

I made a quick javascript benchmark using the online sunspider tests  (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html).

The results are impressive with more than 60 times acceleration (The global transaction passes from 35 seconds to 0.5 second) !

Have a look on the the  full results using a standard IE6 vs the same IE with the plugin.

The test configuration:

  • Microsoft Windows XP Professional Version 2002 Service Pack 3
  • IE version 6.0.2900.5512.xpsp_sp3_gdr.090206-1234

The only actual drawback is that windows 2000 is not yet supported.

Thanks to Cyril for helping me running the benchmark.

Edit: Chrome Frame plugin is usually lauched by using a specific meta tag in the HTML header. In case you need to force the use of chrome frame without changing the original site, you may trigger it by adding cf: at the begining of the url: (like cf:http://le-moulin-de-verre.com/fieldnotes/).

See the documentation for details


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