• Google Working To Remove A Big Barrier To Chrome Frame: Administrator Rights

    Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010

    MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple. Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat. Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in... → Learn More

    I love the whole concept of Google Chrome Frame. It’s Google spitting in the face of Microsoft and showing them that their software isn’t good enough for the modern web — by recreating it as Google software. Granted, Microsoft finally looks to be evolving with IE9, but they had years to do that, so Google stopped waiting and did it for them. Ballsy. Brilliant.

    But Chrome Frame, which became an official stable product today after a few months in beta, has had one major weakness: it requires administrator rights to install the plug-in. Sadly, that’s something a ton of users in corporate environments don’t have. And that’s one segment that needs Chrome Frame the most, because they don’t have the option to install another browser. But Google is working on getting around that requirement.

    The search giant said as much in their post today announcing the stable build of Chrome Frame. “We’ve set aggressive goals for future releases: we’re working on making start-up speed even faster and removing the current requirement for administrator rights to install the plug-in,” Google engineer Tomas Gunnarsson writes today. He doesn’t elaborate as to how exactly they’ll do that, but they’re working on it.

    He also notes that Google is putting Chrome Frame on the same rapid release cycle as the rest of Chrome. That means a new version every six weeks or so. That’s like a fraction of a nanosecond in IE release cycle years.

    And finally, full Gmail and Google Calendar support is coming to Google Frame in the “near future,” Google says.

    Product: Google Chrome
    Website: google.com
    Company Google

    Google Chrome is an based on the open source web browser Chromium which is based on Webkit. It was accidentally announced prematurely on September 1, 2008 and slated for release the following day. It premiered originally on Windows only, with Mac OS and Linux versions released in early 2010. Features include: Tabbed browsing where each tab gets its own process, leading to faster and more stable browsing. If one tab crashes, the whole browser doesn’t go down with it A...

    Learn more

    Windows Internet Explorer (IE), formerly Microsoft Internet Explorer, is the primary graphical web browser developed by Microsoft for the Windows Operating System. The most recent release of IE is Internet Explorer 8, released in March of 2009. It is the most widely-used internet browser. Microsoft Internet Explorer was originally released as a Plus! Package for Windows 1995. Internet Explorer 8 features faster loading, predictive URL bar, Web slicing and increased security. Microsoft has some relevant videos on IE8.

    Learn more

    Sponsored Ads

    blog comments powered by Disqus

    Sponsored Ads

    Sponsored Ads

    Upcoming Events

    Disrupt SF 2012

    San Francisco, CA