Embassies was a research project that "radically refactored the web": applications had much greater isolation, relying on only a minimal isolation abstraction, and yet they could also be much richer than Web 2.0 JavaScript apps, employing nearly any legacy library.
The 10-Kilobyte Web Browser provides a concise introduction and motivation.
Embassies: Radically Refactoring the Web is the best-paper award-winning paper and its associated talk.
How to Run POSIX Apps in a Minimal Picoprocess describes the tricks and techniques we used to persuade legacy application and library software stacks to run in minimal containers.
Missive: Fast Application Launch From an Untrusted Buffer Cache explains the performance story: how we can deliver isolated applications, each with its huge set of library dependencies, while keeping interaction snappy.
Leveraging Legacy Code to Deploy Desktop Applications on the Web is the paper that launched this line of research. It validated the basic hypothesis on programs with modest dependencies, but couldn't yet show how one might replace the entire web browser.
Rethinking the Library OS from the Top Down (ACM paywall version) The Drawbridge project was a fork of Xax applied to Windows guest applications. This paper won the ASPLOS Influential Paper Award in 2022.
The code for embassies in this image was built against a 32-bit build of Debian GNU/Linux 6.0.10 (squeeze), a 2014-era release. Much has changed since then. The easiest way to see the pieces working in action is to launch a VM-packaged demo that brings all of its dependencies with it.
build-demo.md records the steps I took to build the demo VM from the Debian distribution and sources in this repo.
apologies.md mentions some practical mechanics of how the demos are wired together that would be useful to someone trying to port these demos into the modern world.