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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."
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.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
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.