Windows 7: Microsoft Gazelle Browser OS Evolving Beyond Windows IE

Microsoft is working to produce not only non-Windows operating systems, with examples such as Singularity and Midori, but also the evolution of the web browser beyond Internet Explorer. However, Microsoft Gazelle is not a plain vanilla browser; in fact, it evolved into an operating system capable of serving as platform for the increasingly sophisticated web application environment, according to Helen J. Wang, senior researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond. Wang is responsible for Gazelle, which she insists is nothing more than a research project, and not even close to a prototype.

“Everyone accepts that applications need to run on operating systems,” Wang stated. “However, this has not been the case for Web applications; they depend on browsers to render pages and handle computing resources. Yet browsers have never been constructed to be operating systems. Principals are allowed to coexist within the same process or protection domain, and resource management is largely non-existent.”