Microsoft's "Gazelle" browser detailed -- it's more of a research project

If you're particularly attuned to tech gossip, you'll know that Google's Chrome OS announcement has prompted a lot of whispers about something called "Gazelle" being cooked up in Microsoft's labs. Part browser, part OS, the word on the street is that Gazelle will be announced soon, and ultimately compete in some way with either Chrome (the browser) or Chrome (the OS). As usual, most of this is just based on hopes and fairytales, but the scholarly folks at Ars Technica have done some digging and come up with a white paper from Microsoft Research that details some of what Gazelle is all about -- and surprise surprise, although it shares some similarities with Chrome, it's actually quite different.

At the most general level, Gazelle is an experiment in building an ultrasecure browser. Like Chrome, it breaks tasks up into different processes, but instead of separating at the page level, Gazelle breaks individual page elements into different processes, allowing content from different servers to be isolated and ultimately providing fine-grained security controls. To manage all these different processes, there's a central "kernel," which is where all the OS talk stems from -- it's all still running on Windows, and the rendering engine is still IE's Trident engine, but Gazelle manages all those separate processes independently, kind of like a virtualized OS. It's certainly interesting stuff, but it's still all just a research project for now -- Chrome OS is still vapor, but it's clear that Google intends to ship something, while Gazelle seems more suited to inspire future versions of IE. Still, it's interesting reading if you're into it, so hit the read link for more.

Read - Ars Technica analysis
Read - Microsoft Gazelle white paper [Warning: PDF]

[Image courtesy of Robert Scoble]

[MioTheGreat Posted Jul 10th 2009 10:41PM]

Why would you assume that?

Microsoft already has a very secure implementation of sandboxed browsing processes which are managed by a main process.

To my knowledge, no one has managed to hack through the ieuseriexplore interface since IE7 was released. The trick is all in having a very limited set of function calls between them that don't do too much.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2009 8:04PM]

Yes, companies actually do research on various solutions that they want to investigate. This is normal part of doing business, this is what the research department is for. I mean... what every.

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 10th 2009 10:12PM]

Don't you hunt Gazelles on a Safari ;P

or are they trying to better firefox at the animal name game :/

dumb move apple

[Dead Man Inc Posted Jul 11th 2009 12:02AM]

Hopefully whatever Microsoft is working on this "Gazelle" project is as good as "Gisele," as in Bundchen.....

[iFargle Posted Jul 11th 2009 5:13AM]

We need more browsers with the tabs /above/ the window, like Chrome. Also, WHY hasn't Google released it for Mac / Linux yet?! It's been far too long!

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2009 5:38PM]

For years, Firefox/Netscape fanboys (and the entire "tech journalist" community) bashed Opera for having tabs above the window. Now that Google does it, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. But hey, the Netscape/tech journalists bashed Opera for having tabs. And ad-blocking. And shortcuts. And standards-compliance. And so on.

[looselycoupled Posted Jul 11th 2009 2:36PM]

I just wanted to add that whether people like Microsoft or not, Microsoft Research is completely different. They work on truly incredible technology, and all of their projects they released to the public have been awesome. They also provide a ton of new developer tools and utilities.
Check out their stuff:

MS Research projects:

# PhotoSynth (creates 3D environments from still images of a scene)

# HD View (viewer for enormous multi-Gigapixel panoramic images)
* Windows users can use the native plugin version here: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/HDView/

# SeaDragon / Deep Zoom
http://livelabs.com/seadragon/

# Image Composite Editor (automatic stiching program for making panamoric images. Way more advanced than others. Also comes in Photoshop plugin for creating HD view compatible pics )
http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/groups/ivm/ICE/

# Worldwide Telescope (3D astronomy application)

# GroupShot (tool for creating perfect group photo out of many imperfect ones)

Dev stuff:
- They have created new extensions for C#/.NET for parallel processing, functional programming, generics, etc

- the original ClearType subpixel font rendering in Windows XP

- Singularity OS and Bartok compiler (system for creating an operating system in managed code (.NET)

- BigTop and Gridline (distributed computing architecture)

- BitVault (distributed P2P storage)

- Web Sandbox (virtualization layer for web app security)

- Accelerator (library for GPGPU processing using .NET/DirectX9)

- Infer.NET (Machine learning library for .NET)

[mex Posted Jul 11th 2009 4:04PM]

Gazelle vs Leopard... ummmmm :)

[(Unverified) Posted Jul 11th 2009 6:51PM]

Internet Explorer: Reloaded.