It’s been a while since Microsoft shared publicly anything new about its “Gazelle” browser research project.





Last we heard, Microsoft researchers were working on building a new kind of Web browser that would be more secure by isolating the browser from the operating system. I’d say the project is the closest thing Microsoft has to a direct competitor with Google’s Chrome OS — except for the fact that Microsoft isn’t trying to pretend that some kind of operating-system-like layer is no longer needed by PCs and devices in a Web-app-centric world.

In checking up on Gazelle, I discovered a few interesting new tidbits. For one, Gazelle (formerly known as MashupOS) has morphed again and is now part of a research project known as ServiceOS. The focus of Gazelle was on security/protection; ServiceOS fleshout out the vision for what resource access and management would like like for Web applications.
Two of the Microsoft researchers behind the project — Helen Wang and Alex Moschuk –published late last year a white paper explaining the evolution of their new ServiceOS vision.

From an introduction to that paper: “Existing browsers rely on resource access control and sharing mechanisms built into traditional OSes. Unfortunately, such mechanisms are ill-suited for many complex web services, such as those embedding mashups of other web services.”

Sounds like Google’s premise with Chrome OS, right? Traditional OSes are unwieldy when it comes to running Web apps/services and are no longer needed?

Well, not exactly.

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ServiceOS: Microsoft's morphing browser-operating system project | ZDNet

Posted By: JMH
26 May 2010