Google Chrome Frame to the rescue!

Many of you are still using Microsoft Internet Explorer as the default browser. Which version are you using, especially in your company? I'd be interested in that! Your comments will be greatly appreciated. Why? Well, in IT terms, IE7 is an ancient piece of software today. Even IE8 is already quite old, too, let alone the ten years old IE6 which should clearly be banned from this planet, even according to Microsoft, see IE6Countdown which is a Microsoft website. But read on...

To mention a few facts: IE6, IE7, and IE8 all do not support the latest technologies used by today’s web applications. They are all significantly slower than newer versions of IE (IE9+), Google's Chrome, or Mozilla's Firefox. I know many of you are not allowed to arbitrarily install applications on your machines due to your company's understandably restricted IT policy. So still many of you are stuck with IE8, IE7, or even IE6.

But hey, there's something named "Google Chrome Frame" to the rescue! It's an AddOn for Internet Explorer that allows you to use the capabilities and the speed of Google Chrome from within your old IE! That's nothing new, but since a few months, you even do not need needing administrator rights to install it. Have a look at the Chrome Frame Installer. Go ahead at your own risk, and carefully read Google's user license agreement.

After installation, only dedicated HTML5 sites and sites specially prepared (like Google Mail etc.) are rendered using Chrome Frame under the hood. So you might still need to tweak your Windows Registry (again no need for admin rights) to get Chrome Frame to run as the default browser engine for ALL websites within IE.

So if you have installed Chrome Frame, and if know what the Windows Registry is, how it works, and dare to change it, have a look at the Chrome Frame Troubleshooting site to look up the registry keys you need. The most important key you need to create is a key named IsDefaultRenderer. Its REG_DWORD value needs to be 1, and it must located under HKCU\Software\Google\ChromeFrame. If that ChromeFrame folder does not exist, just create it. Restart your IE, go to e.g. heise.de, right-click into the page. If you see a context menu containing the menu item "About Google Chrome Frame..." you are successfully using Chrome's engines under the hood of your old IE.

By the way, did you know there are now more people using Google's Chrome browser than there are Firefox users, see StatsCounter. This is no surprise to me. Chrome works just fine, and it updates itself. And that' what IE9+ will do in the future: On the Windows Team Blog Microsoft's Ryan Gavin says that they "plan to automatically upgrade Windows customers to the latest version of Internet Explorer". Well, ten years late, but a good start.