Microsoft first announced its new Spartan browser at a Windows 10 event earlier this year, with promises of greater speed, lighter resource usage, and a couple of nifty features like a reading mode and drawing on webpages. With Project Spartan, a very early pre-release version (v.0.1, actually) Microsoft is finally giving up on its Internet Explorer browser brand. The last few versions of IE made impressive strides in speed, new standards compatibility, and trim interface design. But the despised software just couldn't shake off the rep earned by its proprietary predecessors, especially the problematic IE6. Nonetheless, Internet Explorer is still the most widely used desktop Web browser, according to new U.S. government numbers.
Let's also not forget that the modern Web, with all its application-like capabilities, owes its existence to IE's pioneering of technologies such as Dynamic HTML and Ajax. And the browser was also the only one with a really effective privacy tool—Tracking Protection. But that's all in the past now. With Project Spartan, Web developers working on new services (such as Twitter's Periscope) will feel even less inclined to make sure their Web apps work in Internet Explorer.
Starting Up
To get Spartan (which is currently only available in Windows 10 for desktops), you'll need to register as a Windows Insider with the Fast updates setting, and update Windows 10 to build number 10049. This will occur automatically if you've turned on automatic updates. Keep in mind that if you can wait, you may be better off using the more-stable Slow update track, since the fast track breaks some features; in this case, for example, you can't run Hyper-V virtual machines. I installed the new OS version on a Microsoft Surface Pro 3 and a nice big all-in-one PC, the 27-inch Lenovo Horizon 2e.The new browser's very flat earth icon appears in the taskbar when you start up the new OS version, but so does good old Internet Explorer's more-familiar button, so you can still run IE if you run into problems with a particular site.
Interface
True to Microsoft's claims, the Spartan interface is very lean and trim. In fact it's so discreet that you may not even find the address/search bar at first. The browser sports eight controls along the top (not counting the reporting smiley button): back and forward arrows, Refresh, Reading Mode, Add Favorite, Favorite Folders, Web Note, and Overflow Menu (…).
The tabs extend all the way to the top edge of the browser window, so you can only drag it around from the area between the rightmost tab and the minimize button. This could take some getting used to. The Favorites bar is off by default, for a cleaner appearance. On both machines I tested, the flat globe icons overlapped the top of the webpage below. Most sites showed the generic globe icon in the Favorites bar; of the sites I tried, only ExtremeTech.com and Facebook showed their own favicons.
The Star button is different from that found in the last few versions of IE, where it opened a three-tab panel for Favorites, History, and Feeds (who uses those anymore?). It now works more like the star in other browsers, so you can actually add to your favorites (a.k.a bookmarks) or reading list. The next button with the star-on-a-folder icon does offer a tabbed panel, with four tabs for Favorites, Reading List, History, and Downloads. The last two weren't built out at the time of this preview, so they're just placeholders at the moment. Reading List shows a nice thumbnail view of the sites you've saved as well as the pages' titles.
Typing into the combined search/address bar drops down suggestions from your history and search suggestions, as has become standard in browsers. The Find on page tool looks nice and clear like the rest of the browser, but in testing, it didn't find text that was clearly on the page I was searching.
Pop-ups are blocked by default, but interestingly, Do Not Track is not enabled by default as it was in IE11. IE's more-effective privacy tool, Tracking Protection, is MIA, as are any extensions or customizations at all. Microsoft has stated that the browser will get extension capability later. There's also no useful new-tab page as yet, like the most useful one in Internet Explorer 11, which not only shows search and recent sites tiles, but also lets you reopen recently closed tabs.
One hidden benefit of Spartan is that there will only be one browser, rather than the confusing two Internet Explorers—the modern full screen ("Metro" if you will) version and the standard desktop browser. Spartan will fulfill both roles without the jarring differences, and its larger, touchable controls that are nevertheless easy to use with a mouse should make the single browser interface work.
One nitpick about the browser window interface is that you can't resize to fill the screen height while maintaining the window's width, as you've been able to do in any Windows program since Win 7. Another interface trend the browser bucks: It doesn't shut down when you close the last tab—something I approve of. You can set Firefox to behave this way, but exiting is the default behavior.
New Features Reading Mode.
Safari introduced this browser feature way back in 2010, and it's shown up elsewhere, especially in specialized mobile Web browsers. The Spartan implementation wakes up in the form of an open book icon that's enabled when you're on a site for which the mode makes sense, such as a tech blog. Reading mode uses an off-yellow background with a pleasant font that recalls an actual paper book. The mode preserves inline images and links, so you're not completely restricted to reading. In Settings you can change the Reading view to have a lighter or darker appearance.
Web Notes. This is a pretty cool tool that lets you mark up and comment on webpages, and then save or share them with others. The pen-and-paper icon takes you to the feature, which displays a purple toolbar (OneNote purple, in fact) across the top of the browser. It lets you draw, highlight, add text boxes, and select rectangles to crop into portions of the page. Once you've marked up and annotated to your taste, you can save your creation to your reading list or favorites or share it to any other app that accepts images. I was surprised that share targets didn't include mail or messaging apps, but it's early days for the browser.
Cortana Integration. Microsoft put Cortana integration first in its list of what's great about Spartan, but I didn't really notice it much in my testing. I did notice that if you highlight text and right-click, you see an "Ask Cortana" option. This pops a sidebar on the right with any info she can find about the selected text. You can also simply type Weather in the address bar, and you'll see your local forecast. Highlighting an address failed to bring up a Bing map for me.
Compatibility
In random site testing, I couldn't find a major site that didn't work in Spartan—PCMag, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr, Yahoo, Tumblr, Twitter, and several others worked fine. And I was stunned to see that Periscope, Twitter's new live-video-streaming service, played in Spartan, since trying to load the site in IE11 yields a "Please use a modern browser" message.A key to this may be found in Spartan's User Agent string. This is the text sent to websites so they know what browser they're dealing with. Spartan reports that it's Mozilla 5.0, Apple WebKit 537, Chrome 39, Safari, and Edge 12—no Internet Explorer user agent mentioned in there. (Edge is the name of Spartan's new underlying page-rendering engine.) This could mean that Microsoft is committing to being compatible with those browsers, and that users will no longer see any "Your browser isn't compatible" messages.
Chrome now has some company as a browser with Adobe Flash rendering built in. Spartan lets you turn its integrated Flash Player on and off if you prefer. In-browser PDF viewing is also a perk of Spartan compared with IE, though Firefox and Chrome have had this for many versions.
On the oft-cited HTML5Test.com site, which measures how many new standard features a browser recognizes, Spartan earns a score of 375, well ahead of IE11's 348, but also well behind Firefox's 449 and Chrome's 523. Do take into account that Google builds a lot of these "standards," which are more experimental and not widely used, and also that Spartan is in its very early stages, so it has time before release for support to be implemented. It already does support WebGL graphics, which should make gamers happy. But WebRTC, for things like real-time audio/video calls, isn't yet supported.
Performance
Spartan is underpinned by a new Edge HTML rendering engine, replacing IE's venerable Triton engine. The browser is still very much beta software, with the occasional glitches that entails. Sometimes it would not respond to clicks until several seconds after, and sometimes I couldn't type into text boxes. But outside those instances, browsing felt snappy. Even pinching and zooming Bing and Google Maps on the Surface Pro was smooth and delay-free.I tested on a Surface Pro 3 with a Core i5 CPU and 8GB RAM. I ran two JavaScript benchmarks, SunSpider and Google's Octane, as well as Microsoft's Lite Brite benchmark from ietestdrive.com, which measures hardware acceleration.
Those who think IE is slower than Chrome should note that that was only the case on Google's own benchmark, Octane. It's interesting to note that Spartan improves on IE on that benchmark but in everything else—SunSpider, IETestdrive Lite Brite, and startup time—the new browser has quite a bit of catching up to do with its predecessor. On a side note, I found it interesting that Firefox nearly matches Chrome on Octane, and bests it in SunSpider.