IE 8 runs ten times faster with Google Chrome plug-in
Chrome Frame boosts Microsoft browser performance
By Gregg Keizer | Computerworld US | Published: 14:23, 24 September 2009
Microsoft's Internet Explorer zips through JavaScript nearly ten times faster than usual when Google's new Chrome Frame plug-in is partnered with the browser, benchmark tests show.
According to tests run by Computerworld, Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) was 9.6 times faster than IE8 on its own. Computerworld ran the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite three times each for IE8 with Chrome Frame, and IE8 without the plug-in, then averaged the scores.
Released Tuesday, Chrome Frame lets IE utilise the Chrome browser's WebKit rendering engine, as well as its high-performance V8 JavaScript engine. Google pitched the plug-in as a way to instantly improve the performance of the notoriously slow IE, and as a way for Web developers to support standards IE cannot handle, such as HTML 5.
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The extra speed and HTML 5 support are necessary, said Google, if IE users are to run advanced Web applications, such as Google Wave, a collaboration and communications tool that debuted last May.
Notably, IE8's SunSpider scores with Chrome Frame running equaled Google's Chrome browser, a solid indication that the plug-in effectively turns any version of IE into the speed equivalent of Chrome itself.
Earlier this week, Computerworld matched Chrome 3.0, the current production version of Google's browser, against four rivals -- IE8, Mozilla's Firefox 3.5, Opera Software's Opera 10 and Apple's Safari 4.0 -- and pegged Chrome as the fastest of the five Windows browsers by comfortable, sometimes extreme, margins.
Chrome Frame must be installed by the browser user, but it can be triggered automatically by Web site and application developers using a single HTML tag on their sites or in their applications' code. Until those sites and applications are modified to call on Chrome Frame, users can manually force IE to use the plug-in by prefacing the URL of a site with the characters "cf:" (sans the quotation marks).
That was how Computerworld obtained the impressive SunSpider results for IE8.
The Chrome Frame plug-in works with IE6, IE7 or IE8 on Windows XP or Windows Vista. It's available for downloading from Google's site.
Comments
dawesi said: not really IE10 is embarrasing for Google and another way for google to sell stuff to you by recording your usage and introducing another security hole into your network
reverse phone lookup said: This is crazy
Timo said: IE8 is sick-dog slow compared to FF Chrome and Opera when running a web-app I am writing And not only was IE8 slow it was screwing up the layouts after window resizes So I installed Chrome-Frame in IE8 to see if it solved those problems It did However IE8 froze up as I tried to close it immediately after the Chrome-frame install and it had to be killed in Task Manager But when I relaunched IE8 afterwards it not only had newfound speed the resizing issues were fixed Kudos to Google
QwertyNinja said: Wow just ran some java benchmarks on my pc with ie8 and chrome before the chrome frame IE8 finished a little over 10000 ms after 850ms Chrome finished at 950 ms Thats a huge difference