Palm, with webOS, has shown the market that making a platform based on standard HTML, CSS, and web hooks that tie into system level components, was possible and could be done elegantly. Ian Hickson, the man writing the HTML5 specification, who now works for Google, would like the browser to be the platform of choice one day. Millions of people around the world use an email client, or social network, or other service that can be accessed from any computer that has access to the internet. Microsoft wasn’t going to sit still and watch the connected world progress toward web based applications and keep on trumpeting the notion that the operating system underneath is irrelevant.
Helen J. Wang, senior researcher in the Systems and Networking group at Microsoft Research Redmond, is working on Gazelle; a browser that isn’t really a browser that runs on an operating system that isn’t really an operating system. The concept she and her team are developing is currently just a research project, but the fundamental question they’re trying to answer is: what if we built a browser with the best parts of an operating systems?
“Everyone accepts that applications need to run on operating systems,” Wang says. “However, this has not been the case for Web applications; they depend on browsers to render pages and handle computing resources. Yet browsers have never been constructed to be operating systems. Principals are allowed to coexist within the same process or protection domain, and resource management is largely non-existent.”
I’d be more excited if a product group was working on this instead of a research group. Microsoft has the worst track record when it comes to supporting internet standards, so why would they want to mature this into shipping software? Still, cynicism aside, this only confirms Google’s best on the internet as the platform for the future, Palm’s webOS as the ideal way to build an OS, and the growing importance that software that connects over the internet will be to our daily lives. Expect to see browsers on mobile phones only become more powerful and have access to more of the local data that sits on your device.
[Via: Microsoft Research and All About Microsoft]