Microsoft "wouldn't risk family" with Chrome Frame plugin

 

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By Stuart Turton

Posted on 25 Sep 2009 at 08:12

Google has sparked a war of words with Microsoft, after releasing the Chrome Frame plugin that effectively turns Internet Explorer into Chrome.

Google Chrome Frame is a plugin for Internet Explorer that supplants Microsoft's native rendering engine with the turbocharged V8 engine powering Chrome.

The plugin certainly has a number of advantages, not least of which is that is brings HTML 5 support to IE 8, however Microsoft claims it compromises security.

"With Internet Explorer 8, we made significant advancements and updates to make the browser safer for our customers," Microsoft says in a statement.

"Given the security issues with plug-ins in general and Google Chrome in particular, Google Chrome Frame running as a plug-in has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts. This is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take."

Google Chrome Frame running as a plug-in has doubled the attach area for malware and malicious scripts

Naturally this didn't play well with the other browser makers, with Mozilla's Dion Almaer noting on Twitter that "Microsoft scared of security of plug-ins. Uninstall Silverlight now."

Google has also responded, though in slightly less sarcastic fashion.

"Google Chrome Frame is an open source plug-in that is currently in an early developer release and was designed with security in mind from the beginning," Google claims.

"While we encourage users to use a more modern and standards compliant browser such as Firefox, Safari, Opera or Google Chrome rather than a plug-in, for those who don't, Google Chrome Frame is designed to provide better performance, strong security features, and more choice to both developers and users, across all versions of Internet Explorer."

The explanation certainly strikes a different note to the combative blog posted by Google engineer Lars Rasmussen, the engineer behind Chrome Frame.

"Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the web's users, has not kept up with fairly recent developments in web technology," he explains on the Google blog.

"In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind."