With Windows 10, Microsoft decided to abandon the so-so legacy of Internet Explorer in favor of introducing a clean slate for themselves in the form of Edge, formerly known by the much cooler name of Project Spartan. While recent iterations of Internet Explorer were much zippier and more standards compliant than IE of old, Microsoft could never quite shake the stigma that years of neglect and the ever infamous IE 6.0 created.

When Microsoft announced Project Spartan, I was quite excited, as were many in the Windows community. The idea of Microsoft returning to the browser wars in force was an exciting and much needed change of pace. Chrome, widely considered the best Windows browser and the most used browser in the world, has become a fat, slow behemoth over the years. Don’t get me wrong, Chrome is still plenty fast and usable, but the Google developed browser eats RAM, integrates a questionable level of Google Account reliance, and has become more of an OS-inside-an-OS than any other Windows browser. Firefox has continued to develop at a regular pace and continues to be a wonderful browser, but hasn’t managed to compete with Chrome well since its arrival (although this might change with the release of Firefox’s Windows 10 update). And let’s not even mention what happened to Opera.

So, when I booted up Windows 10 for the first time, I was excited to try out Edge. Let me just get this out of the way: Edge is miles better than any previous browser from Microsoft and is a solid 1.0 product. Sure, it’s missing major features like extension support, but the overall experience is quite good. Features like Reading Mode and Reading List are not built into any other Windows browser, giving Edge an edge (pardon the pun) for web article addicts like myself. Edge even has a built in Dark theme that looks absolutely gorgeous.

Compared to IE 11 and Chrome, Edge has a bit more UI chrome, thus showing slightly less content in the page. Disable the bookmarks bar, however, and the UI shrinks down to roughly the same size as Chrome with the bookmarks bar enabled.

As you can see, Edge uses slightly more screen space to display it’s UI, thus resulting in slightly less content per page. Overall, this isn’t that much of a problem as the amount cut off is very minimal. In fact, I very much like the flat aesthetic of Edge when compared to Chrome’s slight gradient. And again, the dark mode just gives Edge that extra hotness.

Edge has all of the functionality of a modern browser and then some. Like Chrome, Edge has Adobe Flash player built in, allowing you to browse Flash content without having to download Flash player manually. It’s also easy to turn Flash Player off. Want to watch Netflix using their HTML5 player? Go ahead. Edge supports HTML 5′s protected content feature, and can playback Netflix content in 1080p (vs 720p for Chrome). Your homepage and new tab page are configurable, including options to start the browser with multiple tabs. Edge supports Do Not Track requests, although they are disabled by default, and you can change your default search engine, albeit the process is not quite apparent. If you use Bing, you’ll get extra functionality, such as Cortana.

Cortana in Edge allows you to use natural language in the search box to quickly check things like the weather and stocks without performing an actual search. She can also be used to pull contextual information from webpages, such as location and reviews for a restaurant website or Wikipedia entries and definitions for highlighted words. If you opt to use another search engine such as Google or disable Cortana at the system level, you’ll lose out on all of these features.

Another interesting and new Edge feature is Web Markup, which allows you to annotate web pages right inside the Edge browser and then save those annotations to OneNote or share them with others. It’s certainly an interesting feature, albeit the usefulness of it is questionable. I can see this being a very popular feature among web developers and their clients, giving both a simple and easy way to share thoughts on the project. Being able to send annotations to OneNote could prove useful for students as well, as they could markup webpages while researching for a term paper or thesis and save those annotations to their OneNote section relating to that essay. I personally don’t see myself using this all that often, but I do see potential uses for this feature.

Of course, Edge is also missing basic functionality and certain major features. Edge will be getting extension support later this year, but launched without it. This means useful extensions like AdBlock, Reddit Enhancement Suite, AlienTube and Save to Pocket aren’t usable in Edge. If you don’t need any of these features, then Edge missing them is not a big deal. But, if you’re like me and have become reliant on these extensions being there, Edge might not be quite ready for you to use. Pinning websites to Start also doesn’t seem to work very well. A major feature of IE in Windows 8, Edge seems to have difficulty with pinned sites. The browser will let you pin sites, but trying to open them from Start results in Edge simply not loading the site, instead doing a search for part of the URL. This was a pretty big bug I experienced when trying to replace the Modern Netflix app from Windows 8.1 with the website in Edge, only to find it didn’t work as I expected. Edge is also missing features like right clicking links and images to save them to your machine. One hopes Microsoft will quickly fix this, but as it stands there is no way to save webpages, images and other content using the right click menu.

All this leads nicely into performance. Microsoft has been improving their browser performance since IE 9 launched, and Edge is no exception. Edge strips out all of the legacy IE code (although IE is still present in Windows 10 for those who need it) and replaces the Trident rendering engine with something new. Startup times and rendering times are fast, certainly comparable to Chrome in my tests. Sometimes Edge will get hung-up rendering a page, or seemingly wait for the entire page to load before displaying anything, but Chrome has just as often rendered pages just as slowly. In general use, Edge certainly works. Even site compatibility is solid for a 1.0 product, although there are some websites that display compatibility errors and suggest you use Chrome, Firefox or IE. Most of these sites work just fine, simply displaying the error. Some of these sites, however, may require you to bounce out to the old IE (accessible from Edge’s ellipses menu in the upper right) or use an alternative browser in order to function properly. Most sites work fine, but you may run into a few that don’t. Again, for a 1.0 product, the overall compatibility is solid.

No performance overview would be complete without numbers, and Edge is certainly no slouch in the benchmarks either.

As you can see, Edge totally owns Chrome in the Sunspider, Octane and JetStream Javascript tests. Chrome takes the cake in the Kraken Javascript test, but Edge still won 75% of the Javascript tests on the board. In HTML5test, a benchmark that judges a given browser’s HTML5 compliance, Chrome decimates Edge with a score of 526 to 402. This doesn’t mean that Edge is a bad HTML5 citizen, just that Chrome has implemented more HTML5 features. Chrome also wipes the floor with Edge in Browsermark, one of the most intensive browser benchmarks out today, with a score roughly 66% higher than Chrome. Where Edge really shines is in memory usage, a holdover from IE 11 which also had a light memory footprint. With 5 tabs open (Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, The Verge and YouTube), Chrome used over 5 times as much RAM as Edge. Now, Chrome has separate processes for each tab and extension, plus several background processes. Edge also has separate processes for each tab, plus background processes. I imagine the gap between Edge and Chrome to narrow when Edge gets extension support, but I’d hazard a guess that Edge will always have a smaller footprint than Chrome. All of these benchmarks were run on my gaming desktop, which features an Intel Core i7 2600k clocked at 3.2GHz, 16GB of RAM, a 250GB SSD and a GeForce 560 Ti with 1GB of VRAM.

Microsoft has a long history with browsers, but much of that history (especially when you narrow it down to the past 10 years) has been garbage. With IE 9, 10 and 11, Microsoft showed that they were ready to put their adult pants on and work to make IE a better web citizen, but their inability to shake the negative stigma that years of neglect created resulted in a do-or-die situation for Microsoft. If they truly wanted to play a role in the desktop browser space (and, by extension, in search with Bing as the default search engine), they were going to need to start fresh. That’s the promise they made with Spartan, and it’s the promise they’ve mostly kept with Edge. Edge is a stark change from IE. In some ways, it’s a massive leap forward. In others, it’s a disappointing step back. But, on the whole, Microsoft has delivered a solid 1.0 product with Edge, and I can only assume that Edge will get better as time goes on.

Will I be using Edge? Not yet. The lack of extension support is a major downside. My browsing habits demand the presence of at least a couple mandatory extensions. Once Edge gets extensions you can bet I’ll be using it more, and possibly making an unanticipated switch from Chrome.