We all know that Internet Explorer, especially the older versions like IE 6, is slow and insecure. You may also have heard that Google released a plug-in, Google Chrome Frame, that essentially lobotomizes IE and replaces its functionality with its much faster Chrome Web browser.

It’s a cute trick, and it really does show off just how much faster IE with Chrome Frame is than plain-Jane IE. I’ve done it myself on my Windows XP and 7 boxes and the results are stunning. I expect it to be faster, but what I got was ‘knock your socks off’ faster. I saw complicated pages that were fat with JavaScript and took up to 10-seconds to load with IE, explode onto the screen in less than a second.

Microsoft has thrown a fit about this. Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for IE, said, “It’s not necessarily that plug-ins aren’t or can’t be secure, but that running a browser within a browser doubles the potential attack surface in a way that we don’t see is particularly helpful.”

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