Microsoft Spartan: let's take a sneak peek
Not many anticipated features and products announced since the unveiling of Microsoft Windows 10, has grown a reputation for itself, quite like Microsoft Spartan. The upcoming browser, which is planned to be available on the Windows Store, has already gained status as an “Internet Explorer killer”.
Spartan’s Edge Rendering Engine is already available, and worth checking out, for those brave enough to install Windows 10 Technical Preview on a spare drive, to truly experience the operating system’s performance.
Enabling the feature is quite simple, however it should be noted that the experimental nature of the engine is likely to bring about a range of bugs and issues in Internet Explorer. In some cases, users who activated the new feature encountered an endless loop of crashes in Internet Explorer, rendering the browser completely inaccessible. As previously mentioned: tread at own risk.
To enable Spartan’s Edge Rendering Engine in Internet Explorer, we need to type “about:flags” in the address bar. The Experimental Features screen will appear, where we’ll be able to activate the Experimental Web Platform Features.
After restarting Internet Explorer, the performance boost is substantial, pushing Explorer to the level of Google Chrome and Firefox. These features of course will not change the look of Internet Explorer, but merely replace the active rendering engine that displays web pages.
It’s unlikely that Microsoft will swap Internet explorer’s own engine with Edge, as it would make little sense, considering that most users are already expected to jump at the opportunity to use Spartan as soon as it becomes available, while, quite literally, trampling IE in their path.
With Project Spartan, users can expect a range of new and interesting features, including Cortana integration into the browser, the ability to clip web pages and save them to OneDrive, and an offline reader that loads web content for later viewing, in instances when an Internet connection isn’t available.