[1] The central notion of the project was to apply operating system (OS) principles to browser construction.
[2] In particular, the browser had a secure kernel, modeled after an OS kernel, and various web sources run as separate "principals" above that, similar to user space processes in an OS.
[2] The goal of doing this was to prevent bad code from one web source to affect the rendering or processing of code from other web sources.
[3][4] By the July 2009 announcement of ChromeOS, Gazelle was seen as a possible alternative Microsoft architectural approach compared to Google's direction.
[8][9] But by 2015, the SecureOS project was also dormant, after Microsoft decided that its new flagship browser would be Edge.