When announcing that a Windows 10 Preview with the new Project Spartan browser was available, Microsoft made clear that the browser ain't done yet. What we have now is an early iteration of the company's take on a legacy-free forward-looking browser—a browser that's going to ditch the venerable Internet Explorer name.

Superficially, everything about the browser is new. Its interface takes cues from all the competition: tabs on top, in the title bar, the address bar inside each tab. The look is simple and unadorned; monochrome line-art for icons, rectangular tabs, and a flat look—the address bar, for example, doesn't live in a recessed pit (as it does in Chrome) and is integral with the toolbar (unlike Internet Explorer).

The design concept works well for me, though I doubt this will be universal. As is so often the case on Windows, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the operating system. While parts of Windows 10 have a similar appearance—most notably the Settings app—Windows overall remains an inconsistent mish-mash of looks and feels, to its detriment.

Perhaps more concretely, the new interface, though pared back and minimal in appearance, happens to be quite large. Internet Explorer 11 actually gives more vertical space over to Web content than Spartan. This is a curious decision, given the prevailing trend toward cutting back browser chrome in order to maximize the impact Web content has.

Interface aside, there are three user-facing features that Microsoft is promoting for Project Spartan: Cortana, annotations, and reading mode.

Reading mode is already found in a variety of browsers: it reformats pages to make them more readable. While the presentation seems good enough, the feature seems very basic currently. Most significantly, it doesn't appear to handle paginated articles (or at least, it did not work with the pagination schemes I tried), which is actually quite a big flaw in this kind of feature. Every time you hit the end of a page you need to turn off reading view, hunt for the next page button, go to the next page, and then re-enter reading view. Comparable features in other browsers handle this more elegantly, constructing composite views made from all the pages. Spartan also supports the reading list feature introduced in Windows 8.1.







I don't really understand the annotation feature. Tap the annotation button and you can annotate pages, adding comments to them with pen, mouse, or keyboard. The annotated pages can be shared and saved. It's not that the feature doesn't work—it seems to be relatively capable—I just don't understand the purpose. This is not something I've ever found myself in desperate need to do, and I struggle to believe that it's going to draw many people to using Spartan.

The feature that Microsoft does hope will win people over to Project Spartan is the Cortana integration. Type certain things into the address bar and Spartan will show you structured, meaningful information. Select text on a page and you can similarly "Ask Cortana," and you'll see a structured response. At the moment, this is quite a bit more limited than it is on Windows Phone. Although Cortana on the Phone—and Bing, which powers everything—understands, for example, flight numbers, Spartan doesn't. No doubt more features will be plumbed in as the browser is developed, as will be more languages and countries: currently, Cortana only works in the US, using English.







Under the hood, the point of Spartan is that it's a legacy-free rendering engine. The Trident engine used in Internet Explorer can do things like act in an Internet Explorer 6-like mode, and it supports ActiveX controls. The Internet Explorer browser also supports things like custom toolbars. All of these capabilities are removed in the Edge engine and Spartan browser. Spartan can only use the cutting edge browser mode without making concessions to old pages and non-standard behavior.

Edge is a fork of Trident—it started out as Trident with the legacy stuff ripped out, though it has since diverged as an increasing number of new features have been added—and currently the performance of the two appears very similar. As time marches on, we'd expect to see Edge start to outpace its older sibling as its code becomes cleaner and simpler.

As an odd quirk of development, Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10 still has the slight edge in terms of Web standards compatibility. While the capability will be removed in due course, Internet Explorer can still use Edge. Moreover, Internet Explorer allows various experimental features to be turned on through its "about:config" page. While a similar experimental opt-in capability is coming to Spartan, it's not there yet.

This creates the slightly odd situation that Microsoft's cutting edge, legacy-free browser scores 375 (out of 555) on html5test.com's scoring system, but Microsoft's old legacy browser can currently be coaxed into scoring 387. When using the old Trident engine, however, the score drops to 348.

It's too early to say just how usable Spartan and Edge will be as a daily use browser. For the most part, the extreme compatibility that Internet Explorer and Trident offer shouldn't be important on the public Web. The Web in general has to be compatible with a range of browsers, and this tends to preclude dependence on Internet Explorer's older or more esoteric features. But the Web is a messy place. Pages that try to detect which browser someone is using, pages that use non-standard features, and pages that use standard features in incorrect ways, are all out there. Trident has been built to support them, and conversely, pages have been built to support Trident.

I'm sure that Microsoft will do its utmost to ensure that Spartan is good enough for most people, most of the time, but Web compatibility is a sticky issue. Confidence that the browser will work properly will take time to build up.

I also wonder just how much Spartan matters. We don't know what the browser will be called when it's released, but its new name should distance itself from Internet Explorer's checkered history and so-so reputation. Is a new look, a new name, and a handful of new features really going to win over users and get them back on Microsoft's browsing platform? I'm not sure I see it.