Google Announces Admin-Free Chrome Frame Installs For IE | Hacker News Reader

Google Announces Admin-Free Chrome Frame Installs For IE

techcrunch.com

74 pointsguptaneil25 comments

The IO session is up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YkEUpJQP3o&feature=chann...

29:30 mark is where the admin rights discussion begins.

A shame they solved the problem for people using IE8 on Win7. In my opinion that is not nearly the pain point that IE6 on XP is. :/

They demoed it using IE8 on Win7, but did he ever specifically state that it works only there?

No, but as it would generally only be useful on XP and they didn't show it, I'm not optimistic.

Nice! but, if this is possible then it's a security violation, no?

What prevents malware from mimicking the same technique?

I have to assume they are using some kind of "trusted" activex cert?

So now how can I get my web app to prompt users to install this?

"As an alternative to server-side sniffing, you can use the CFInstall.js script to detect GCF and prompt users to install the plug-in without restarting their browsers"

http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-gett...

I for one would love to be privy to this "backstage" discussion... but I'm half-way around the world. Let's hope the Google guys remember that there's this new-fangled "internet" thing and spill some of the beans up here.

This also moves chrome frame from a "funny geek joke" to a viable tool to ensure your web site is displayed properly, no matter what browser your visitors are using.

Wow, this is really significant - I think it is not understating things to say that Google just saved HTML5, at least in the near term.

I've been lamenting for a long time that I have no story to tell customers who need to cater to users stuck on locked down machines with IE. This finally gives a story to tell and we can move forward with a baseline of Chrome / IE9 / FireFox 4 without leaving any large group of users out.

So, if a user can get Chrome Frame on the system and running without admin rights... why not just have them download an admin-free standalone instance of Chrome instead? I fail to see the benefit of running in IE.

I'm clearly missing something.

End users shouldn't have to remember that they need browser A to access one site, and browser B to access another. Remember, a problem Chrome Frame helps address is that many companies short sightedly tied themselves to internal intranet tools that only work in IE, hence the desire for an IE browser that can also handle HTML5 (and runs on XP).

The actual link for installing the new chrome frame installer as a user (not admin) is: http://www.google.com/chromeframe?user=true

I don't know how my restrictions compare to others, but why not use a portable Chrome? Chrome frame is for serious limitations, I hope no filter blocks the download.

This thing stores saved passwords in plain text. Like everything else in IT, it has security vulnerabilities which will need to be managed. This will bypass group policy restrictions preventing the use of plugins, downloading of files/web-fonts, etc and has no central management functionaltiy. Google is likely to enable it for accessing GMail, Google Enterprise Apps, etc - which means large companies and governments are not going to be happy about this at all. They may have just killed off quite a bit of their enterprise credibility here...

If a company is using IE6 (whilst giving lipservice to security) it deserves to die in a fire. Hopefully it shall promptly meet its doom in favor of more technically adept competitors ... the IT equivalent of the Darwin Awards.

This plugin still works if a company has deployed IE9 and Group Policy compatible builds of Firefox or whatever else. It's a Google-endorsed way around group policy.

Right, after I wrote that I watched the video and noticed it appeared to work only on Win7, making it mostly useless. Still, no tears shed.

Google (correctly) sees attitudes like that as a threat against the free web they need to run their business and are routing around it. They don't care about "enterprise credibility" or whether they allow some companies to restrict what their users can do.

It's technically correct, but governments are going to have a big problem with this. It's going to make it pretty hard for them to sell enterprise solutions. Just sayin'.

Governments already hate google. As for selling enterprise solutions that was never googles main focus so that is a little like saying that Microsoft will have trouble selling word to vi fans.

They're adding Group Policy support and msi installers (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YkEUpJQP3o&feature=playe...). There's not a lot of detail there but they're not ignoring it.

My guess is they're doing this through registry emulation - you probably have to run an application that starts IE after installing hooks to emulate the registry, since normally the only way to install a COM component is to modify parts of the registry that can't be accessed by non-admins. By emulating the registry APIs you can 'fake' the installation for a single process and load COM components as a guest user. Probably not something Microsoft would approve of, but I've done it in a COM-based application before to make it usable for guest users, and it worked.

since Windows 2000 you've been able to register COM components in HKEY_CURRENT_USER.

now how about IE frame for Chrome 12? I need to be able to manage Bing paid search and look at how horrible my development sites look in IE6 on this here MBP...

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