Entries tagged with web browser - Channel 9

Wir erklären das Internet und geben Tipps und Tricks im Umgang mit dem Browser

Oliver Scheer — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 08:35:00 GMT

Wir erklären, wie das Internet funktioniert, was ein Browser ist, was man bei der Benutzung beachten muss, was es mit Webseiten und deren Darstellung auf sich hat und geben Tipps und Tricks im Umgang mit einem Webbrowser… und beantworten auch die wichtigste aller Fragen: Warum die Oma von Lukas ihm den Laptop wegnimmt, obwohl er richtig brav und artig war.

Expert to Expert - Erik Meijer and Lars Bak: Inside V8 - A Javascript Virtual Machine

Charles — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:29:00 GMT

Lars Bak is a virtual machine master. He and team have created a Javascript VM, V8, that takes Javascript syntax and produces optimized machine code directly. The result is very performant execution of Javascript. How does V8 work, exactly? What are the basic design decisions that have gone into it's construction? Why is it designed the way it is? How fast can Javascript really run, anyway? How challenging is it to take a language like Javascript and produce highly optimized machine code?

Erik Meijer, language designer and fundamentalist functional high priest, discusses these questions and more with Lars. We also talk about the language to machine code translation versus having an intermediate step (like IL) that gets optimized further in runtime context by a JITer.

If you want to know the thinking behind the thinking of Javascript compilation, the current state of the art and future directions, then this is for you. Big thanks to Lars Bak for spending time with Channel 9!

Enjoy!

Expert to Expert: Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk - Inside Gazelle

Charles — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:48:00 GMT

Microsoft Research was in the news not too long ago regarding the innovative, outside-the-box research being done by MSR scientists on display at the annual MSR TechFest event. One of the stars of the show was a new web browser project named Gazelle.

Gazelle is a Microsoft Research prototype web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS (emphasis on research and prototype). From the Gazelle Microsoft Research Technical Report: Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection.

Interesting, Captain. This really piqued our curiosity so Erik Meijer and I decided to find out the inside scoop on Gazelle. Why choose an OS architecture to model a web browser? How does it work, exactly? What does multi-principal mean in the context of execution of web pages? Aren't we talking about isolated processes? What happens when a principal is compromised? Is the browser kernel completely isolated from code executing in a principal context(is it possible to "blue screen" Gazelle)? What are the intrinsic challenges with implementing this design? How performant is a multi-principal, kernel-based web browser (what if you have 40 principal contexts running simultaneously, for example)?

This is a great conversation with Gazelle project lead Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk, a PhD student intern developer working on the Gazelle project. We cover a lot of ground and Erik and I are unusually curious given the fascinating model Gazelle represents for a truly secure web browser.

Enjoy! This is a birthday present from Channel 9 to you!