Google Brings Chrome Renderer, Speedy Javascript To IE 239
Posted
by
kdawson
from the behind-enemy-lines dept.
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.
Don't stop now! (Score:5, Insightful)
I think I see Google starting a new tag... "letmefixthatforyou"
Re:Why... (Score:4, Insightful)
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. It's nothing like machine code, it's not even like repackaged interpreter language. Javascript is run straight from the script, and it is a terribly inefficient way to do things, but it is much easier to distribute along with HTML.
JS isn't exactly the future of all websites, but it's certainly easier to work with for light effects than flash.
I'll show you why you want JS to run better... go to ebay.com and press CTRL-F5 and count how long it takes to load. Then, disable Javascript execution and press CTRL-F5 again. I'm sure someone else can suggest a more JS intensive site, but that's all I got right now.
8 hours a week (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Must be a management problem...
Which management will investigate and decide that the only solution to is... more management.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
HTML 5 is not done yet by any means. I wouldn't even say they have what you might call a working draft. 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.
IE still has a very enterprise-oriented development cycle and not the bleeding edge feature explosion we see in most open source browsers.
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.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
i guess some of us haven't been paying attention.
No, you're right. I guess some of us haven't.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't really know what you're talking about here.
IE hasn't caught up to existing, published, finished standards- that's well before we even start talking about initial implementations of things from the in-progress HTML 5 standard. It's the worst browser in the bunch for CSS compatibility- with finished, published standards.
IE needs to play catch-up before it can even think about doing anything with HTML 5. They don't need an unstable browser fork; they just need to actually finish their standards implementations in the stable releases. They're getting better at it, definitely, but they've got a long way to go.
Re:Why (Score:5, 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.
W3C Working Draft (Score:5, 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 [w3.org] 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.
Re:8 hours a week (Score:1, Insightful)
The vast majority of Google's services came about like this:
Jim: "Sucks to be you Bob, doing work on a Tuesday. I'm "working" on my "personal project" today."
Bob: "All you do is browse the web all day."
Jim (browsing the web all day): "Hey Bob look at this!"
Bob: "COOL! We should do that."
Jim: "Fuck it, let's just buy them out."
This includes:
Docs, Earth, Maps, Voice, and a couple others.
It's not only MS that buys out and rebrands.
It's neither good nor bad, but to ignore it and claim Google is doing amazing new things is naive. To ignore it and denounce MS for the same practice (as many do, not necessarily you) smacks of fanboyism.
Re:So, Basically.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Prediction: when YouTube dumps Flash, the new 'YouTube installer' is this.
Re:Security? (Score:2, Insightful)
IE6 has a security model?
Re:Why... (Score:4, Insightful)
Is there an ongoing "my Javascript is faster than yours ha-ha" competition in the browser market?
Uhm... Yes?
Javascript is the one client-side programming language that is always guaranteed to be there, on anything that can reasonably be called a browser. Anything that can be called a web application is probably at some point going to care about Javascript speed. And faster Javascript opens the door to some [google.com] things [sourceforge.net] you might not have thought were possible in a browser.
When looking for a browser, it isn't just speed people are looking for; They want security
Chrome runs each tab in a separate process, meaning it can theoretically sandbox each tab using standard OS techniques -- for example, on Linux, my Chromium does seem to be running things as an unprivileged user, and chrooting them out of the way.
Other browsers are playing catch-up.
add-ons, customization
The Chrome extension API isn't finished, but it's just Javascript and HTML. It's the kind of thing that a web developer could learn in an hour. It won't run Firefox extensions (yet), but it seems likely that it'll have plenty of extensions Firefox won't, just because of how much easier it is to get off the ground.
If I want top speed, I'll use chrome. If I want an all-around great browser, I'll use Firefox.
We don't care, this isn't about you. (And for what it's worth, Firefox is working hard to improve javascript, security, and reliability to match Chrome.)
This is about the 80% who still use IE, and about the rest of us not having to care anymore. I can build a web app that works in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Epiphany, Galeon, Konqueror, Opera, in every browser, ever, with minimal effort -- figure an extra 5-10% development time to make it work on browsers other than the one I develop for. IE will fuck it up and add easily 20-50% to my development time.
Doing it this way means that at some point in the future, hopefully, something like YouTube will force IE users to either switch browsers or install this plugin -- at which point, I can forget that IE exists, and let it all melt away like a bad dream.
What's that I hear? (Score:2, Insightful)
IE's not done till Chrome won't run!
Re:Do I still have to use Windows (Score:2, Insightful)
fully agree.
1 implement cool net apps and give people an IE plugin so to achieve an almost full market penetration
2 sooner or later an IE update breaks the plugin
3 suggest the users to switch to chrome else the net app won't work
4 profit!
of course microsoft could fight that by making sure the plugin always work with each ie update.
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:3, Insightful)
Very true indeed. Every time an enterprise upgrades their version of IE, everything in the enterprise dependent on IE stops working which means another cycle of development at the enterprise.
While it's true that many "enterprise" apps make use of ActiveX, it seems kind of stupid to design a Web app that depends on a spacific version of an application known to update every few years (like a browser).
Excuses, excuses... (Score:5, 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 ..." [w3.org].
(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.
Re:W3C Working Draft (Score:5, 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.
Re:Excuses, excuses... (Score:4, Insightful)
Popular doesn't mean standard. These are separate concepts. If it did, then every browser except for IE could be considered non-standard. Canvas is only popular within the enthusiast web developer clique, or "circle jerk" if you will.
Yes, what would those narcissistic onanist web developers know about the relevance of the canvas tag to creating... web applications?
Wow, since some snarky webtrash said it, it must be true.
I haven't gotten snarky yet, but perhaps I will when you explain what "webtrash" means. I certainly hope it's not your term for someone who actually has a working understanding of the issues we've been discussing.
I tend to use the test suites when referencing this:
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-css?uas=IE7-IE8-FX3-OP9 [webdevout.net]
That's *awesome*. With IE 8, we can now say that after 8 years of lagging behind, the browser created by the world's richest software company marginally edges out Firefox 3 in a feature-by-feature comparison CSS 2.1 features! Gives you a surge of pride, right? Why, if it constituted the most commonly used version of the product, that'd almost be the same thing as giving the world back all the man-hours spent trying to work around the support that wasn't there until this year!
On a different topic, I'd be interested in your take on the relative importance in day-to-day terms of, say @page:left and reliable absolute positioning.
Re:threat to Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
Their strategy wasn't to cripple IE. Their strategy was to leverage their domiant position so that smaller third parties could never get into the game, by not supporting stuff that didn't encourage developers to go 100% Microsoft.
Sure, you could have a plugin, but who wants to require ANOTHER plugin?
Re:threat to Microsoft (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft is in a bind. On the one hand, it doesn't want the web to become so useful people will use it to replace Office, and drop Windows for Firefox on Linux. On the other hand, it can't let IE be too unfunctional because then Firefox will take away most of its market share. So Microsoft keeps improving IE, but still too slowly to make web apps as much of a threat as they could be. Microsoft is basically losing this war, but it is dragging things out as long as it can.
Release it for FireFox please? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
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.
Re:8 hours a week (Score:2, Insightful)
It's very clever on google's part, it gives them a way into the traditionally Microsoft locked down business environment, it lets the managers of these networks run IE for the IE-only-intranet, and also provide modern browser functionality. It's quite an aggressive move.
Chrome doesn't have to become your new browser, Chrome OS doesn't have to become your new do-everything-OS, it has to be useful to some people, on some platforms, worldwide. More potential customers for google = more customers for google ( and by customer, I mean eyeballs-on-adverts ).
Re:Makes you wonder... (Score:2, Insightful)
I was talking about the current IE version, IE 8. It has the most complete CSS 2.1 support. That's all there is to it.
I am sorry to be the one to break it down to you, but IE8 has a list of hacks for popular websites to make them work in IE8. Acid tests are on that list.