As opposed to monolithic browser architectures

Apr 10, 2009 07:58 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft considers this the right time for the browser to evolve as an operating system. This is in fact what Gazelle is about, building a web browser with a multi-principal operating system construction. Essentially, what this means is that an OS architecture is used as the model for constructing the Gazelle browser, as Microsoft Research attempts to tailor Gazelle to the modern Internet, a concept that has long evolved past the actual browsers themselves. With Gazelle, the software giant is looking to move past monolithic architectures specific to all traditional browsers.

“Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection,” Microsoft revealed in “The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser” whitepaper.

In the video embedded at the bottom of this article you will be able to see Helen Jiahe Wang, senior researcher, Microsoft Research, along with Alex Moshchuk, a PhD student intern developer, explaining Gazelle. Users will be able to get just a taste of the future of browsing in Microsoft's perspective. The Redmond company has already built an IE-based prototype, and the Trident rendering engine, which embraces Gazelle’s multi-principal OS architecture. According to the software giant, it will be possible to turn a browser into a multi-principal operating system, as the example involving Internet Explorer showed, while at the same time, maintaining backwards compatibility, including DOM and JavaScript. Actually, Microsoft used Trident in Internet Explorer 7 in order to build the prototype using the Gazelle multi-principal OS concept.

“A multi-principal OS construction for a browser brings significant security and reliability benefits to the overall browser system: the compromise or failure of a principal affects that principal alone, and not other principals or Browser Kernel. Although our architecture may seem to be a straightforward application of multi-principal OS construction to the browser setting, it exposes intricate problems that didn’t surface in previous work, including dealing with legacy protection for cross-origin script source, display protection, and resource allocations in the face of cross-principal web service composition common on today’s web,” the software company added.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).   Get Microsoft Silverlight