Gazelle – Microsoft’s new browser OS

Recently Microsoft announced the technical preview of Office 2010 , which will be released, of course, in 2010. And, with the new Office, it is expected that Microsoft will also unveil the web office suite, making the stripped down versions of desktop Office applications to be available at online.

So, what is the connection between the above two lines and the title of this post!? Well, to connect them, just remember that few days back Google announced it’s plans to develop a operating system, named Chrome OS, which will be optimized to the core for running web applications (a.k.a Google applications, such Gmail, App, etc.). Google banks mainly on the Chrome browser in order to run the web application faster than any other browser. Because, Chrome browser was designed from scratch with improved JavaScript and rendering engines to run web applications faster.

The most important thing which differentiate Chrome browser from other browsers is how Chrome handles the process. In normal browser all web application’s processes will be running inside browser’s process, which is ineffective. And, if one web app mis-behaves or dies, it cause the entire browser to crash. Chrome avoided this kinda crashes by making each tab in Chrome browser to run in it’s own process, thus making a seperation between web application. It gives two advantages:

• Each web application gets it’s own ground to play, thus increasing the performance.
• Even if one web app crashes, the other apps continue to run, because now they are in a separate process and not affected by the crashed process.

This move from Google was considered to be a ground breaking, since the need for heavy JavaScript processing was growing day by day. Google did and is doing everything it can to attract more and more developers and people to use Google’s services and web apps. While Google marching towards, Microsoft can’t sit idle, otherwise it will be losing the market to Google. Thus Microsoft announced it’s motive to jump into the web market by making the Office suite availabe at online.

But Microsoft’s current browser, Internet Explorer definitley can’t run the web Office. Microsoft needs much more than just a browser. To be accurate, Microsoft needs an operating system (a web version of Windows) And here comes Gazelle – Microsoft’s new browser (still under research/development), with the architecture similar to an operating system. With Gazelle, Microsoft is trying to redo the browser architecture (the same way as Google did) to make it suitable for the present day web applications.

Similar to Chrome, in Gazelle, each web application (web site) will be running in it’s own space, known as Principals. The browser will provide the browser kernel to manage and control the multiple principals that are running. Each principal will have the security and the separation from the other principal, thus improving the performance and security.

Even though Gazelle has an architecture that is similar to Google Chrome, it differs in some places, which I’ll be covering in my next post.