Lord of the Web

No antelope is going to crush the life out of IE with its curved horns ( though one species of the fox family might do that soon enough). Enough with the biology class though. Gazelle is the codename of a new “multi-principal OS” based browser from the stables of Microsoft Research.

According to the paper published at Microsoft Research, the browser takes security and robustness to new levels, though, at the moment, it is not as swift as its namesake. The Browser Kernel of Gazelle is an multi principal OS that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. Browser Kernel runs in a separate OS process, directly interacts with the underlying OS, and exposes a set of system calls for browser principals. The processes are sandboxed so that they cannot interact with the underlying system and must use system calls provided by Browser Kernel. While this is similar to what is done in Chrome, the term “process” gets a whole new dimension in Gazelle.

While new browser architectures like IE8 and Google’s Chrome treat every tab as a new process, Gazelle goes a step further and treats parts of a website — such as iframes, subframes, and plug-ins — as separate processes. Such a treatment ensures maximum security, but, at the moment atleast, renders the browser pretty slow. Gazelle uses some parts of IE ( like IE7’s Trident renderer and JavaScript engine) to function. These parts would later be removed and built from the ground up to get a completely new browser

Gazelle might soon stot out as a standalone product and signal the end of Internet Explorer as we know it. Or atleast, the work done on Gazelle is expected to enter into IE and make it a much better OS.