{"id":11096,"date":"2010-01-19T17:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-01-19T15:09:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2010-01-19T17:09:00","modified_gmt":"2010-01-19T15:09:00","slug":"microsoft-s-web-app-browser","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/software\/11096-microsoft-s-web-app-browser.html","title":{"rendered":"Microsoft's web-app browser"},"content":{"rendered":"

2010 kicked off with the news that Google’s Chrome browser had passed Apple’s Safari to claim third place in the web browser popularity stakes<\/a>. The news will no doubt fuel the ongoing browser wars, but the real battle in the coming year will be to build a browser better able to run web applications.<\/p>\n

And Microsoft is already working on a new browser which is clearly aimed at this market, even if the company is still denying suggestions that it will commercialise the product in the near future.<\/p>\n

The project – officially just a research project – is known as “Gazelle” and is a browser that has the look of a traditional web browser but many of the features of an operating system. In a public posting on the Microsoft Research website<\/a> – titled “When is a browser not a browser? – the company describes Gazelle as a “multi-principal OS … that supports an increasingly sophisticated Web environment”.<\/p>\n

Unlike traditional browsers, which process each web page as a single entity, Gazelle’s ambition is to treat each part of a web page – or application – as a separate process. This could include frames, sub-frames, external dynamic content such as advertising or even plug-ins.<\/p>\n

One of the problems with treating a web page as a single entity is that any number of elements on a page could be used to import malicious code into a web application. By treating each element separately, Gazelle hopes to manage these risks without affecting other parts of the page, or “principal”.<\/p>\n

Most modern browsers now already isolate individual tabs from one another so that a problem on one page doesn’t affect the other open tabs, but Microsoft researchers argue that this isn’t enough. Instead they are trying to create a browser that even isolates content that is returned from the same domain name if it is in a different element. This allows for each element to be managed separately and check for integrity.<\/p>\n

Microsoft Research says that “a Web page might offer content such as ads or newsfeeds from other Web-site principals. Yet to the browser, all these principals coexist in the same process or protection domain. An ad containing malicious or poorly written code could hog the network connection, degrade performance, freeze the entire page, or crash the browser. In a browser operating system, a ‘bad’ principal would not be allowed to affect other principals, the browser, or the host machine.<\/p>\n

Increasingly, browser security violations – such as click-jacking which surfaced over the past couple of years – insert code into portions of a trusted site and trick the user into following links to malicious sites. As web-based applications become more common web security becomes increasingly important. Gazelle addresses threats such as click-jacking by ignoring particular click actions for a pre-set amount of time until elements have been verified.<\/p>\n

Gazelle also controls threats from plug-ins. Any number of developers are able create plug-ins for browsers such as IE and Firefox, but they can also include malicious code. Gazelle has security built-in to sandbox plug-ins so that “bad” plug-ins are not able to affect other running web applications or the entire operating system.<\/p>\n

The one downside of a tighter security model such as Gazelle’s, however, is that the browser takes longer to render pages. In the original research paper<\/a> the team details tests in which opening a new blank browser tab can take more than five times as long as on Internet Explorer 7. Opening a tab with a site loaded, however, took less than twice as long as IE7. <\/p>\n

2010 is going to see a flood of new web browser innovations and as software makers scramble for position in the growing web-application market, Gazelle could well be one of the more interesting releases of the year – if Microsoft decides to release it as an end-user product.<\/p>\n

Microsoft web-app browser<\/strong><\/a> – comments and views<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Web applications are going to be big in 2010 and Microsoft is working on a new browser to run them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11096","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-software"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11096\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mybroadband.co.za\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}