How do Standalone Browsers work?
At the heart of the Standalone Browsers is a virtual machine engine, a lightweight implementation of core operating system APIs, including the filesystem, registry, process, and threading subsystems, completely implemented within the Windows user-mode space. Desktop Web and Mobile Browsers executing within the virtual environment interact with a virtualized filesystem, registry, and process environment, rather than directly with the host operating system.
The virtualization engine handles requests within the virtualized environment internally or, when appropriate, routes requests to the host device filesystem and registry, possibly redirecting or overriding requests as determined by the virtual application configuration.
Virtual machine browser contents can either be entirely isolated from, merged with, or hidden from corresponding locations on the host OS.
The virtualization engine dynamically remaps shell folder locations such as My Documents so that proper browser behavior is preserved across client operating system versions. Similarly, registry key values containing explicit path names or prefixes are dynamically remapped to the appropriate values for the executing host device.
A cross-platform emulation layer allows many legacy browsers to run properly on new operating systems such as Windows 7 and 8. A generalized multi-platform virtualization layer dynamically adapts virtual machine behavior based on the endpoint platform, allowing a single universal binary to be deployed for each browser/emulator.