Microsoft’s answer to Google Chrome: Watch out for Gazelle!
By Tarry Singh at 12 July, 2009, 10:21 am
Update: This has been previously pointed out at RWW around Feb’09
In order for Microsoft to compete, Valdes said, the company needs “a fast, cheap lightweight browser-OS hybrid” like Gazelle.
Operating as a browser-based OS, Gazelle would likely manage access to devices and system resources, as well as enforce policies. In theory, this would protect users’ devices from malicious plug-ins and other malicious code.
A browser OS makes particular sense within the context of cloud-based applications, whose growing prevalence and popularity has put pressure on browsers to juggle power-intensive Web pages while interfacing with the user’s device.
“Yet browsers have never been constructed to be operating systems,” Helen Wang, a senior researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond, is quoted as saying on the Microsoft Research Website. “Principals are allowed to coexist within the same process or protection domain, and resource management is largely non-existent.”
Should Gazelle turn out to be a suitable netbook OS, however, the question is how quickly Microsoft can produce a commercial version to blunt the market penetration of the Chrome OS, which Google says will roll out in the second half of 2010.
Helen has also written a research paper on Gazelle
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