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People hate IE6; they’ve made that abundantly clear on the web. Unfortunately, plenty of people are still stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So Google is doing something about it.

Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. LOL… seriously: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome.

It’s freakin hilarious that Google seems to hates IE so much that it has spent its own time “improving it”. You could also read that as “spent it’s own time to destroy it”.  Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, say that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. RIGHT… whatever… if it helps kill IE6 off the web I’m all for it.

So what is this thing? It’s just a plug-in that creates a new frame inside of IE that IS the Chrome browser. The plug-in itself is only about 500K, but then it must download around 10 MB of Chrome-related data to work correctly on a machine (I assume a one time download). The look will be so seamless that a user shouldn’t realize they’re not simply browsing with their regular old version of IE… except that it’ll be hell-a-faster and standards compliant.

To target the Chrome plug-in for IE, developers simply have to insert a meta tag in their HTML code. If Chrome Frame isn’t found, the page will render just as it normally would in IE.

Chrome Frame will work with IE6, IE7, and IE8 on any Windows-based machine.

So this is obviously wicked cool, and Microsoft’s response should be just as cool as well!!!!

You can find Google Chrome Frame here. And learn more in the video below.

Mozilla VP of engineering Mike Schroepfer claims that Firefox 3 is 9.3x faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 2.7x faster than Firefox 2 in terms of JavaScript performance. In terms of Gmail message load time, he claims Firefox 3 is 6.8x faster than IE7 and 3.8x faster than Firefox 2. And he says Firefox 3 beats Apple’s Safari, which is also faster than Firefox 2.

Firefox 3 is slated for full release in June of this year. Unless there’s some major unforeseen bugs I cannot see them missing that time frame for release. If you’re already using Firefox 3, be sure to type about:robots into the address bar to discover a fun little Easter egg. For a detailed list of what Firefox 3 has to offer, check out its release notes.

Download RC1 now

I love the concept of UAC. I’m sure it’ll make the OS more secure for people like my mom. For power users, you’ll soon want to just shut the damned thing off. I know it has good intentions but it just gets in the way sometimes. I was always under the impression that UAC was either on or off, and that if you turned it off you lost some of the security built into IE7. Turns out the folks over at TweakVista have written up an article on how to disable UAC, but only for the administrator accounts. That’s pretty slick, now it won’t get in my way, but it will prompt my wife/kid/mother/etc and help keep them safe.

Follow these steps to disable UAC only for administrators:

1. Click on the Start button and type in secpol.msc and hit Enter.
2. Expand Local Policies and then Security Options.
3. Scroll to the bottom and locate “User Account Control: Behavior of the elevation prompt for administrators in Admin Approval Mode”.
4. Right click on this setting and select Properties.
5. Set the value to Elevate without prompting.
6. Reboot.

As soon as you do this, the security center will start barking at you that UAC is disabled. I guess they intend to annoy you one way or another. You can of course disable the security center alerts as well. Click on the alert in the system tray, then click Change the way Security Center alerts me and select ”I do not want notification messages from Security Center”.