Morgan Stanley is testing software that could turn its Microsoft browsers into Google browsers.
At the big-name financial house, many employee machines still use Internet Explorer 7, a Microsoft web browser that made its debut as far back as October of 2006. Like so many large corporations, Morgan Stanley limits employee machines to certain approved software -- working to maintain security while ensuring that applications work as they should -- but such well-intentioned policies can also keep newer software at bay.
"We're a bank, you know, so it's not so simple to make the switch to a newer browser," says Aurelije Zovko, a Morgan Stanley executive director who handles IT duties for the New York-based company.
IE7 is significantly slower than the newest versions of IE, Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers, and it can't handle the latest technologies used by today's online applications, including then fledgling HTML5 standards. But there's a way for Zovko to work around the limitations of the aging IE7 without actually switching to a new browser. Zovko is kicking the tires on Google Chrome Frame -- an Internet Explorer plug-in that adds Google's latest browser engine to older versions of Microsoft's browser, which are still used across vast swaths of the corporate world.
In the Morgan Stanley group that Zovko is working with, employees use custom browser applications specifically designed for IE7, but at the same time, the group is adopting a newer application that requires newer browser technology. With Chrome Frame running inside IE7, they can accommodate both the old and the new apps inside the same browser. Yes, on the face of it, Morgan Stanley could handle all these applications simply by installing the full-fledged Chrome browser alongside Internet Explorer, but things aren't always so simple inside the corporate IT department.
Morgan Stanley is just one example of a company straddling the line between aging Internet Explorer browsers and Google's Chrome. Three years after its debut, Chrome is making some serious headway among consumers -- just this month, it passed Mozilla's Firefox to become the world's second most popular browser, behind IE -- but Google is also pushing Chrome into the business world, hoping to loosen the foothold Microsoft established so many years ago. And this push includes Google's shameless effort to remake Internet Explorer in its own image.
Google's effort is indicative of a sweeping revolution across the world of corporate IT. Traditionally, businesses adopt new technologies at a painfully slow pace, but Google and others are working to grease the wheels -- and in many cases, employees inside big businesses are turning those wheels by adopting new technologies without the explicit approval of their IT managers. Chrome Frame is an example of both.
Chrome Frame Rides the Wave
Microsoft released its latest browser, IE9, this March, and it is hard at work on the next version, IE10. But the corporate world is still years behind. According to rough numbers from online research outfit Stat Owl, IE8 is still the most popular corporate browser with about 38 percent of the market, and the second and third most popular are IE7 (27.56 percent) and IE6 (6.43 percent).
As it works to increase the adoption of Google Apps -- its suite of office applications that only run inside web browsers -- Google must also encourage businesses to modernize their browsers. Google Apps don't work as well with older browsers -- if at all. Older versions of IE have significantly slower engines for running JavaScript -- the web's standard programming language -- and they can't accommodate other standard technologies, such as WebGL, a means of handling 3D inside the browser.
So, about a year ago, Google introduced IT admin controls for deploying and configuring both Chrome and Chrome Frame across business networks. Many companies can simply make the switch from, say, IE7 to Chrome. But others -- because they're running legacy applications that require older version of IE -- need another option.
In essence, Chrome Frame equips older versions of Internet Explorer with the speedy rendering and JavaScript engines at the heart of Chrome. It was originally built to run Google Wave -- the company's e-mail-meets-IM-meets-document-sharing service -- on older versions of IE. But Wave died a premature death, and Chrome Frame is now part of Google's widespread effort to turn itself into an enterprise company.
Inside businesses, employees can install Chrome Frame on their own -- and many do. But the company is also encouraging business IT departments to officially adopt the plug-in. "We want users on better browsers," says Google Chrome engineer Alex Russell, who joined the company specifically to work on the IE plug-in. "But when they can't move, for whatever reason, Chrome Frame turns into a viable alternative."
Google declined to provide statistics on the adoption of Chrome and Chrome Frame inside businesses, but Russell says he had seen companies officially make the move to Chrome Frame, and others outside of Google are saying much the same. Appirio -- an outfit that helps companies adopt new-age cloud computing services from the likes of Google and Salesforce.com -- tells Wired that it too is working to move businesses, including Morgan Stanley, onto Google's IE plug-in.
"We're not surprised anymore when when see [IE7]," says Appirio chief technology officer Glenn Weinstein. "It's dismaying to see how many large enterprises are still clinging to IE-only browser policies. You'd think that companies would have come around by now. But they haven't."
Meanwhile, other outfits are making the leap to the standalone version of Chrome while continuing to accommodate Internet Explorer-dependent applications via a third-party Chrome plug-in called IE Tab. SNL Financial -- a financial services outfit based in Charlottesville, Virginia -- has gone this route in order to accommodate its older browser applications alongside Google Apps. "We have a few applications that don't run in Chrome, so people have to use IE or use IE Tab inside Chrome," says SNL CTO Galen Warren. "IE Tab is kinda like the Chrome Frame thing in reverse."
Microsoft Miffed
Google applauds the use of IE Tab. But Microsoft sees Chrome Frame very differently. Since the arrival of the plug-in, Redmond has painted the thing as a security risk. "Given the concerns system administrators have about the security risks of plug-ins, this raises red flags for many IT administrators," Microsoft says in a canned statement. "In addition, across the board we’re seeing browser manufacturers, developers and businesses move away from plug-ins in favor of modern web standards."
When Chrome Frame debuted, Mozilla -- maker of the open source Firefox browser -- launched a similar attack on Google, pointing out that Chrome Frame sidestepped IE's built-in security tools while arguing that the plug-in would end up confusing browser users. "If you end up at a website that makes use of the Chrome Frame, the treatment of your passwords, security settings, personalization, and all the other things one sets in a browser is suddenly unknown," said Mozilla boss Mitchell Baker.
"Will sites you tag or bookmark while browsing with one rendering engine show up in the other? Because the various parts of the browser are no longer connected, actions that have one result in the browser you think you’re using won’t have the same result in the Chrome browser-within-a-browser."
At one point, Mozilla considered building a plug-in that would add the Firefox engine to older versions of IE, but eventually decided against the idea. Though the company has openly discussed Chrome Frame in the past, it declined the opportunity to revisit the topic for this story.
Google has since addressed the criticism with changes to Chrome Frame -- for instance, if you're using IE's private browsing mode and the browser flips on Chrome Frame, Google will turn on a similar setting -- and Alex Russell is quick to reject claims that the plug-in is inherently unsafe. "No one likes being told their browser is deficient. Every browser vendor's first instinct when presented with evidence that users want something else is to try to catch up...A lot of the reaction was totally what you'd expect," he tells Wired. "Microsoft wants its users to upgrade to a new version of IE."
Google's 'Unusual' Tactics
In the meantime, Google has taken Chrome Frame a step further. This summer, the company released a version of the plug-in that end users can install even if they don't have administrator rights on their machines. At least in part, it's a way for employees to use Chrome Frame without the explicit approval to do so. "That sounds like a little bit of a security hole," says SNL's Galen Warren, who was unaware of the non-admin version until we mentioned it to him. "It seems that Google has done a lot of things that kind of get around some of these security measures. It's a little ... unusual."
In the past, Alex Russell has acknowledged that this may scare IT admins. But he also points out that businesses can manage the use of Chrome Frame using Google's admin tools -- meaning they can even block the plug-in if they prefer. But ultimately, Google aims to encourage the use of newer browser technologies
It's a typical Google play. As Mountain View struggles to replace Microsoft inside the enterprise, it's offering more than one tool that actively transforms a Microsoft application into a Google application. Google has offered a plug-in that connects Microsoft Outlook to Gmail and another that plugs Microsoft Office into Google Apps.
Inevitably, these tools raise criticisms -- particularly from Microsoft. But Google is willing to accept the criticism in the short term as it works toward a long-term goal: moving IT departments out of the dark ages. "Organizations have been asked by Microsoft and everyone else to please update their old versions of IE, and the fact that they're still there means that there are some business reasons for them to stay there," Russell says.
"The question is: How can we unblock process of progress? How can we change this situation without forcing organizations to spend the entire up-front cost of either considering or executing on a large-scale upgrade, not just to their browsers but their internal IT systems, their CRM [customer relationship management] systems, their reporting systems for some bespoke thing they did with a contractor years ago? Chrome Frame helps ease the transition over that bridge."
Update: This story has been updated to show that Internet Explorer 7 is not the only browser in use on employee machines at Morgan Stanley. Some machines use Internet Explorer 8. And all are also loaded with a version of Firefox.
