14 DAY TRIAL // The Google Chrome Frame went stable with the release of Chrome Frame 6.0.472.63. The browser plugin which inserts the Chrome rendering engine into legacy browsers to enable them to benefit from the latest web technologies is now considered stable enough for wide distribution.
"Today, we’re very happy to take the Beta tag off of Google Chrome Frame and promote it to the Stable channel," Tomas Gunnarsson and Robert Shield, Software Engineers at Google, announced.
"This stable channel release provides our most polished version of Google Chrome Frame to date, allowing users to access modern web technologies like HTML5 on legacy browsers," they added.
"When Google Chrome Frame went into beta in June, the team set aggressive goals for speed and stability before delivering a stable channel release. We wanted it to start much faster and to reduce crashes by an order of magnitude," they explained.
Google says that it has mostly achieved its goals, the Chrome Frame starts three times faster on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and that most conflicts with other plugins have been resolved.
The team has big plans yet, Chrome Frame will be synced with the Chrome browser and startup times and compatibility should be improved further.
Another goal for the team is to make it possible to install the plugin without administrator rights. The problem is, precisely those who would benefit the most from Chrome Frame, those stuck with IE6, IE7 or IE8 at work, aren't able to install the plugin since they don't have the privileges.
The Google Chrome browser installs locally, to bypass this, but the Chrome Frame can't do the same yet. On the other hand, if administrators would like to deploy the Chrome Frame to all users at a time, Google is also offering a MSI installer.
Google Chrome Frame 6.0.472.63 is available for download here.