Microsoft Research Showcases New Browser Prototype, "Gazelle"

Ars Technica reports that Microsoft has opened up about "Gazelle," a new browser prototype of theirs that is modeled after the underlying concepts of operating system design. "A research team led by Microsoft's Helen Wang recently published a report about an experimental browser prototype called 'Gazelle' that uses processes to isolate page content elements originating from different domains. It builds on the concept of multiprocess browsing but uses more fine-grained isolation to expand on the security advantages that are already delivered by existing multiprocess browsing models. But is it an operating system, Microsoft Research's analogue to Google's Chrome OS? Not quite."

Comments

New Focus

[Haffner]

Microsoft focusing on developing a browser-based OS is directly opposed to their current business model, which involves forcing users to purchase an operating system. Microsoft's focus has always been on for-pay, offline applications. Taking a precautionary foray into Google's future business model seems to show that they are at the very least wary of Google's future plans.

Not an improvement

[Todd Knarr]

MS's idea is nice, but it's not going to help a lot of things very much. It'll help when plug-ins and helper apps go runaway, being in a separate process they won't be able to block the browser itself. But from a security standpoint the problem isn't that those embedded objects are in the same process, it's that they have access to the same page and the DOM elements in it and the data structures of the browser itself. And that won't be solved just by putting them in their own process, not without isolating them from the rest of the page and browser to a degree that'll break a lot of Microsoft's technologies.

Re:Trident?

[BitZtream]

Wow, WTF do you think open source is for? You've managed to imply that the two most important advantages to open source don't exist for two very large open source projects.

Gecko is open source. They can't yank the license out from under you any more than they can from Webkit because the OSS license implies that you can continue to use it forever.

Second, Webkit, like Gecko can stop development right this instant and they won't be any worse off than using Trident. They'll just have to do the webkit or gecko development themselves, which they already do with trident (okay, another MS group does, but thats not the point).

The advantages to OSS is that they can't take away your license to what you're already using. Nor can the death of an OSS project leave you out in the cold with no where to go.

When selecting a rendering engine to replace Trident when I took over the current project I'm working on it was always Gecko or Webkit from the very start because on of the FIRST things I got smacked in the face with when taking over the project is that MS was discontinuing the parts of trident we needed.

So, we switched to Gecko. Try to take those parts away now, go for it. I can continue to use the code I have and bug fix it as needed. I have no dependency on Mozilla if I don't want it. Sure, for the moment I just use what they have and commit bugfixes back to the Mozilla effort because it saves me a whole shitload of effort trying to maintain patches or a fork. Its in everyones best interest for my version of gecko to not diverge from the main code base, and it saves EVERYONE involved time and money by sharing the effort. It doesn't matter that the company I work for doesn't own the copyright to Gecko because the Mozilla guys aren't exerting it to hurt anyone, they just use it to cover their own asses, and have released it under a license which effectively allows me to cover my ass at the same time.

I'm amazed at how someone on slashdot so effectively entirely missed what I consider the greatest benefits of Gecko and Webkit being OSS. Yea yea, finding security issues is great and all, and feature enhancements for free are nice too, but I don't mind paying for those things. Whats far more important to the survival of my company is that I don't have to worry about Mozilla or Webkit doing something that utterly fucks me over. They can't. They have given me a way to protect myself.

That is not something you can get out of Opera or Microsoft, and that is why our company happily contributes all of our changes back to Gecko, which, for reference is in no way a requirement according to MPL, but its most certainly the right thing to do, and as I said, means I don't have to merge our code bases to stay in sync with mozdev.