Gazelle was a research

web browser A web browser, often shortened to browser, is an application for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's scr ...

project by

Microsoft Research Microsoft Research (MSR) is the research subsidiary of Microsoft. It was created in 1991 by Richard Rashid, Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold with the intent to advance state-of-the-art computing and solve difficult world problems through technologi ...

, first announced in early 2009."The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser"
(

whitepaper, PDF) The central notion of the project was to apply

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

(OS) principles to browser construction."Gazelle: Applying Operating System Concepts to the Browser"

OSNews OSNews is a computing online newspaper. It originally focused on operating systems and their related technologies that launched in 1997, but is now aggregating consumer electronics news. The content is managed by a group of editors and the owner. ...

July 7, 2009 In particular, the browser had a secure kernel, modeled after an OS kernel, and various web sources run as separate "principals" above that, similar to

user space A modern computer operating system usually uses virtual memory to provide separate address spaces or regions of a single address space, called user space and kernel space. This separation primarily provides memory protection and hardware prote ...

processes in an OS. The goal of doing this was to prevent bad code from one web source to affect the rendering or processing of code from other web sources. Browser plugins are also managed as principals. ''Gazelle'' had a predecessor project, ''MashupOS'', but with ''Gazelle'' the emphasis was on a more secure browser. By the July 2009 announcement of

ChromeOS ChromeOS, sometimes styled as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is an operating system designed and developed by Google. It is derived from the open-source operating system and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user ...

, Gazelle was seen as a possible alternative Microsoft architectural approach compared to Google's direction."Microsoft's Gazelle browser takes a radical path"
CNet July 7, 2009"Google’s Chrome OS vs. Windows"

The Week ''The Week'' is a weekly news magazine with editions in the United Kingdom and United States. The British publication was founded in 1995 and the American edition in 2001. An Australian edition was published from 2008 to 2012. A children's edi ...

July 8, 2009"Google Chrome OS: is it copying Microsoft's Gazelle or is it more like Splashtop?"
''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in Manchester in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'' and changed its name in 1959, followed by a move to London. Along with its sister paper, ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardi ...

'' July 8, 2009 That is, rather than the OS being reduced in role to that of a browser, the browser would be strengthened using OS principles. The ''Gazelle'' project became dormant, and ''ServiceOS'' arose as a replacement project also related to browser architectures.Resource Management for Web Applications in ServiceOS
/ref> But by 2015, the SecureOS project was also dormant, after Microsoft decided that its new flagship browser would be Edge.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gazelle (Browser) Discontinued web browsers Microsoft Research