Lockdown-evading Chrome Frame exits beta

Google, after working for months on a version of its Chrome Frame that can sidestep PC lockdown constraints, has released the first stable version of the plug-in for Internet Explorer.

Chrome Frame embeds a version of Google's browser into older versions of Microsoft's browser. Chrome Frame shows Web pages using the Chrome engine when Web programmers have set a flag that the software checks for.

One problem with the approach is that the very people who most need the technology often are those who don't have enough administrative privileges to install a newer browser than, say, the decade-old IE6. Thus Google wrote a version of Chrome Frame that hops over the lockdown barrier.