Submitted by Apparently, Internet Explorer is on its way out. JCXP.net is saying that Internet Explorer 8 will be the last traditional version of Microsoft’s web browser, and that Microsoft’s next web browser will be based on a promising Microsoft Research project dubbed “Gazelle”.
Reading through the Microsoft Research paper on Gazelle, it becomes clear that it is an intricate beast. It relies on a “browser kernel”, 5000 lines of C# code, that exposes the underlying system to webpages using a set of system calls. Web content does not interact with the actual operating system at all; all communication goes through the sandboxed browser kernel. The browser kernel takes care of all resource protection and sharing.
In addition, Gazelle takes the multi-process approach used by Google’s Chrome and Internet Explorer 8 a few steps further by not only running each tab or webpage in a separate process, but by also giving separate parts of each website their own process. The authors of Gazelle believe the model introduced by Chrome isn’t sufficient. “This granularity [in Chrome and IE8] is insufficient since a user may browse multiple mutually distrusting sites in a single tab, and a web page may contain an iframe with content from an untrusted site (e.g., ads),” they explain. They go even further by considering content coming from “ad.iloveponies.com” to be separate from “user.iloveponies.com”. Plug-ins are also run in separate, sand-boxed processes, so that if they go bad, they only affect that particular sandboxed plug-in process.
Currently, Gazelle is built with some additional IE bits on top, and is not production ready. Still, it renders most websites correctly, but there is an additional performance overhead thanks to the IE bits. The authors also state that they have made no concessions to backwards compatibility in favour of security.
JCXP now claims that Gazelle will be the basis for Microsoft’s next web browser, which won’t sport the IE name, but there’s no source. Whether or not this is true remains to be seen; when news of Singularity came out, the entire web automatically assumed that this Microsoft Research project would be the next Windows. Still, the ideas behind Gazelle are sound, and don’t sound too far-fetched to be implemented.
The mentioned linked seems to follow this pattern:
“This is something amazing/special – very uncertain, don’t blame us if we are wrong”.
I’m sceptical.
Exciting. It just looks like they are still using Latex for their papers 🙂
I had a look to the PDF properties – indeed, TEX!
Gazelle looks OK to me.
I know a lot of people will just say it’s gonna be crap because it’s from Microsoft, but if these things hold true then this is very good news from a competition and security point of view.
It seems to look like a stand alone product as well, which is excellent news too.
People wouldn’t say things like that if it hadn’t been true so many times over the years.
No it’s not true. Yes some aspects of Microsoft’s software has been crap, but overall they offer excellent software.
It’s a stupid generalisation.
It’s not true now. Trouble is, a bad reputation tends to stick around longer than the actual problems, and there’s no denying that back in the days of Windows 9x a good deal of Microsoft’s consumer software was a bloated, bug-ridden mass of bits. 9x itself, Office 97, etc.
Personally, I don’t use Microsoft’s software because I’m sick of being treated like a thief, it’s the innocent until proven guilty attitude (activation), and the fact that even if I need to reinstall on the same computer I must call them to get an activation code. It’s similar to WMA authorization schemes, no control granted to the user at all. Honestly, people complain about Apple’s controlling methods, but even they don’t put people through that crap. I also have come to dispise a lot of their business practices and artificial software limitations–Vista starter, anyone? So, I choose not to use their products.
They skipped over Vista pretty darn quick to start pimping (er.. prepping) Win7 for release. I’ll have more faith in the company’s products when “back then” stops happening so frequently. Until then, I remain respectfully skeptical.
Don’t be ridiculous. Vista came out end of 06, Win7 will be out end of 09.
In contrast, Win2k came out in 2k and WinXp in 2001.
The marketing hype is all about Windows7 and it’s impending release. After an average of two to five years between major releases, that seems pretty darn short. The fact that they pretty much all but dropped premoting Vista and even the new MS figure head said “uh.. you can skip Vista, we’re going to have Windows7 out for you really soon”…?
I will admit that the windows7 beta is far ahead of where Vista betas and pre sp production versions where. Hopefully the don’t bloat up the userland around the kernel and it retains it’s current snappy responsiveness. That plus IE9 being a truly third party application to the OS could mean some very nice benefits to the end user.
Yes, overall, those 5 years of total neglect were alright. It only cemented the spyware and malware industry we have today.
Reputation is one thing, the damage created is another.
Yes, I think they have cornered the market in this area.
🙂
.. I’ll be right back after I fix another of the office workstations..
Not just their webbrowser either.
Windows is (finally) going modular:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7932149.stm
The capability discussed in that article already exists in Vista (and Server 2003 +). The primary difference with 7 (vs Vista as it’s been available in Server) is that MS exposed the option to remove IE and media-related features within the GUI rather than you having to perform the removal via Package Manager (pkgmgr.exe) or the Optional Component Setup (ocsetup.exe) commandline tools (or via unattended install).
This is a screenshot of the UI in Vista for which in 7 they’ve now added entries for IE, media, and new 7 features.
http://www.activewin.com/winvista/images/Windows%20Vista%20…
If they would use webkit it would give web designers finally the possibility to use css2 to its full potential. It will still be a long time before the old IE-browsers will be gone tho.
The use of webkit is not certain according to the source but I could only hope!
Depends who you are targetting. In some countries FF usage is >50%. Home user usage is higher than corporate usage. Mobile devices like the G1, iPhone and Nokia N-Series all have good CSS support (webkit).
IE6 usage is 20% and dropping rapidly. FF3 usage alone is 20% worldwide. Can you see where this is going?
The point is that you should start developing for standards, HTML5 features and more *now* so that you can hit the ground running. It is not unreasonable to drop support for IE6 and ask home users to upgrade to Firefox if you’re targetting home users.
IE should not be the millstone around your neck when it comes to personal development work.
Problem is, ie6 still is a huge burden for everyone not doing personal development. If I would make a private site I would probably even not support IE7 so much distain I have for this browser. The problem stems from the fact that in public sites even with a market share of 10% you still have to support that utter garbage IE 6 and 7 in reality are once it comes to standard support!
Not sure if ie8 is that much of an improvement, it will help that they seem to support CSS 2.1 properly now, but things like SVG and javascript to the latest level are still a huge issue!
But there wont be any wide adaption of that browser before 2010 or 2011 anyway given the slowness of typical Microsoft herds!
Problem is, that many corporations and banks curently are slowly migrating towards ie7 and some still will be stuck on ie6 for the years to come (seriously, some even run on ie5.5). So if you run a site or page targetting exactly those people you cannot ignore it no matter how hard it is to still support all this. If I had a choice probably Firefox3 and Safari4 as well as Chrome would be the lower limit (sorry opera but the 9er release is still way too buggy for many things dhtml wise) and I would not support anything below!
And nothing from Microsoft as long as they want to push their proprietary SVG copy instead of the real thing!
But reality is different to what is possible, unfortunately. I am just glad that the Firefox users are saner and migrate normally within 6 months to the next release so dragging around stone old firefox versions never has been an issue, same goes for Safari.
(I really love the 4 beta for all its capabilities)
Personally, I can’t wait for min-width/min-height to finally be available to us.
I work for a company that has 35 moderate to very high traffic public facing properties, we just did check of our stats recently when the topic of dropping IE6 came up, and it turns out that it accounts for about 45% of our traffic.
Our typical strategy has been to support latest browsers -1 major revision, but we can’t really do that if half our visitors are on an older browser.
Makes it a huge pain for us and our designers, because we have to fire up virtual machines to test for it.
So have you found out how many of those IE6 users *can’t* upgrade?
Don’t just sit there and assume the marketshare problem is going to sort itself out, as a web developer we all have the responsibility to educate users.
…and as an employee in a company providing a service to people and ultimately looking to make money from them, we have a responsibility to provide the best experience we can to them, not become an IT department they never asked for.
If a significant portion of them used lynx it would be silly in todays day and age, but we would work on providing a good text only experience. If there was a significant amount of mobile users, even though it is very painful to do we would work on good mobile interfaces. The same applies to horrible and obsolete browsers.
Yours is the only sane approach for a business. When those IE6 users will stop existing, I’ll be more than happy.
But many people thinks supporting standards will solve all of their problems, which won’t be true. When IE8 will be here and FF3 and Safari4 will be here (not to mention Opera), designers will still be fighting to achieve a good effect on all of them. Unfortunately, IE6 is a relic of an acient (and fortunately died) Microsoft strategy.
But if people thinks software makers will stop fighting about introducing changes inside their Web platforms (of which, browsers is the key part), that’s just ingenue.
People often forget when Netscape was the bad guy and it was breaking compatibility and IE was the god-sent software supporting all standards. Ironically, IE became so widespread because it was supporting standards better than Netscape…
I don’t know if I would go that far, but they were both non standard in different ways. In some ways IE was dumb (document.all), other ways ended up getting rolled into the specifications because they were either useful or made more sense (element.innerHTML, element.style.*, XmlHttpRequest), and some things they still do more intelligently then the standard way (the ie box model)
But IE was supporting Netscape custom extensions while Netscape wasn’t supporting IE custom stuff. If you think about that, IE deserved its widespread usage. Then Microsoft tried to be the Web itself and failed.
Anyway, what I was stating is the custom browser battle goes far beyond CSS standards support. The battle has moved from supporting your own extensions for HTML/CSS to being able to connect HTML and browser context to my specific platform.
This way I can inject my platform into HTML context, whatever it might be (.NET, Android, those FF extensions and so on…).
min-height is not a problem since height in ie6 can’t handle *> selectors and it treats height like min-height. So you would do something like:
#container {
height: 400px;
min-height: 400px;
}
*> #content {
height: auto;
}
I have never used min-width.
You can have IE6, IE7, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari on the same machine without having a virtual machine. You can have all of them on Windows at the same time.
http://browsers.evolt.org/?ie/32bit/standalone
Download: ie6eolas_nt.zip
This gives you the real rendering engine of IE6 while having access to IE7 at the same time. I have used it so I know it works great.
Edited 2009-03-12 08:54 UTC
I would assume from past Microsoft behavior, that the browser they will be putting out has to be backwards compatible no matter how much that may compromise security or speed.
Otherwise it looks like a promising idea.
They should stick to the HTML standard. Continuing to support broken IE only html makes any standardization compliance about as effective as the security-theater we all get to play a part in at the airports now. Why implement true travel safety when you can give the apearance of security; why implement good html when the broken website still displays fine in IE.
Baby shuffles are all well and good but eventually they’ll have to take some baby steps.
If this is true, I just hope it doesn’t feature a new rendering engine but uses Webkit, Gecko or Presto as otherwise hell will break loose again for web developers.
Using an existing engine or writing something in house is just fine provided they actually stick to the HTML standards. I’m less concerned with how it’s done just as long as the web content is independent of the browser used to view it; the same page should display the same way across browsers.
“Web content does not interact with the actual operating system at all”
That has to be an improvement over the current IE/OS intimacy. Here’s hoping IE9 shows an honest go at unbundling the browser and protecting the end user.
The link to the paper from Microsoft Research below makes for interesting and thought provoking reading: