At its launch event yesterday, Microsoft didn’t divulge much on its much talked about ‘Project Spartan’ web browser. However, the Redmond giant has now provided us with a detailed description regarding Spartan’s operation, its roll-out, and possibly its shipment alongside IE.
If you go through the entire description, you are sure to get a bit lost. Well, let us chalk it down a bit.
For one thing, Microsoft will continue to ship Internet Explorer 10 for some enterprises who have legacy web sites that use older technologies designed only for Internet Explorer, such as custom ActiveX controls and Browser Helper Objects. For rest of us, who aren’t on that legacy side, we can straight away head to Spartan and probably fall back in love with Microsoft.
Also, Spartan will work as a single app which will work seamlessly across all your devices running Windows 10. As explained by Microsoft,
Spartan is a single browser designed to work great across the entire Windows 10 device family – from keyboard and mouse on the Windows 10 desktop to touch, gestures, voice, controllers and sensors.
Spartan provides a more interoperable, reliable, and discoverable experience with advanced features including the ability to annotate on web pages, a distraction-free reading experience, and integration of Cortana for finding and doing things online faster.
Powered by Microsoft’s much-discussed, new rendering engine, Spartan is designed for interoperability with the modern web. The Redmond-giant says that its move to shy away from the versioned document modes historically used in Internet Explorer is a deliberate one, and they are now using the same markup as other modern browsers.
Like Windows 10 itself Spartan will remain up-to-date: as a service, both providing new platform capabilities, security and performance improvements, and ensuring web developers a consistent platform across Windows 10 devices.
Microsoft has also made sure that Spartan remains compatible will the legacy versions of IE as well as websites. Spartan provides compatibility with the millions of existing enterprise web sites designed for Internet Explorer. To achieve this, Spartan loads the IE11 engine for legacy enterprise web sites when needed, while using the new rendering engine for modern web sites. This approach provides both a strong compatibility guarantee for legacy enterprise web sites and a forward looking interoperable web standards promise.
