Windows 7 update rolled out to fix IE 8 security flaws has been considered to be the root cause for many users who feel Google Chrome performance degradation. The update (MS09-054 /  974455) is supposed to fix two critical flaws in IE 8:

976948 The offsetTop calculation for elements that are contained as children of scrolled elements may be reported incorrectly in Windows Internet Explorer 8 976949 You receive a VBScript “Type Mismatch” script error message in Internet Explorer after you install cumulative security update 974455But unfortunately, it effects all versions of chrome to behave unusually.

Chrome becomes unresponsive, sluggish and slower by factor of 10x times (of the order of IE8). The KB articles detail out the fixing of the flaw related to VBScript and javascript, however it modifies Chrome’s Javascript execution engine.

This was brought into notice in the Chrome development community and was also posted  on forum and was confirmed that it was the root cause. Why was this started now, was it a move 2 degrade Google Chrome ‘ s popularity. Was it intentional by Microsoft to make Chrome less popular to Windows 7. What do you think is the reason behind this ?

Via