Gazelle is a research web browser which Microsoft Research announced in early 2009.^[1] The central notion of the project is to apply operating system principles to browser construction.^[2] In particular, the browser has a secure kernel, modeled after an operating system kernel, and various web sources run as separate "principals" above that, similar to user-space processes in an operating system.^[2] The goal of doing this is to prevent bad code from one web source to affect the rendering or processing of code from other web sources.^[2] Browser plugins are also managed as principals.^[2]

By the July 2009 announcement of Google Chrome OS, Gazelle was seen as a possible alternative Microsoft architectural approach compared to Google's direction.^[3][4][5] That is, rather than the operating system being reduced in role to that of a browser, the browser would be strengthened using operating system principles.^[3]

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