You can't download it yet but Microsoft's new browser prototype,
called Gazelle, could well be the software giant's answer to both
Google domination and hackers' threat.
A paper, entitled The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle
Web Browser, was published by a hit team of engineers from Microsoft,
the University of Illinois and Washington.
It introduces Gazelle as a secure web browser that is build as a
multi-principal OS and the authors of the paper claim to have a dummy
running on Internet Explorer, although it appears to be slower than IE7
for now.
The 20-page document describes Gazelle's browser kernel as being an
operating system itself that "exclusively manages resource protection
and sharing across website principals", all within 5000 lines of C#
code.
The concept, the researchers say, is similar to Google Chrome's site
instance in that pages being browsed run in their own processes and
when something go wrong it doesn't affect the whole application.
However, there are two vital differences: Google considers
subdomains as being the same website - mail.google.com,
adwords.google.com and www.google.com would all be brought down if
there's an issue with any one of them. This wouldn't be the case in
Gazelle.
Secondly any embedded content would still be considered as a
separate entity (or principal instance as the paper calls it. We have
experience this kind of behaviour several times over the past few
months with Google Chrome pages crashing because of adverts displayed
in iFrame for example.
Source:
http://www.itproportal.com/security/news/article/2009/2/25/meet-microsofts-new-secure-browser-model-gazelle/1/
http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/79655/gazelle.pdf
http://weblog.infoworld.com/fatalexception/archives/2009/02/gazelle_the_bro.html
