I think many of us have been waiting for the day we could stop using Internet Explorer. And now, finally, there is light at the end of the tunnel. Yesterday, at the Windows 10 press conference, Microsoft showed off boatloads of new software and technology. Among these announcements was a brand new web browser that will come loaded on all Windows 10 devices – Project Spartan.
Project Spartan will supposedly be more compatible with the way the web is written today, and features a new rendering engine. They didn’t say how compatible, but I will remain cautiously optimistic. They did, however, show off some super cool features! This new browser will include:
- The ability to draw on webpages using your finger (on touch screens), a stylus, or your mouse, and share your marks with others. This feature will also sync to your OneDrive account. Note-taking via typing is also supported.
- Built-in options to share web pages through social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, etc.
- A “reading mode” that strips away the clutter from web pages so you can just focus on reading the content.
- A way for you to add pages to your “reading list” to save for later. This list syncs across all of your Windows devices and natively supports .pdf files.
- Extention support.
- Microsoft’s digital assistant, Cortana, will be built into the web browser. She can help you in all sorts of ways, such as scheduling, GPS, reservations, etc.
It’s still unclear whether or not Project Spartan will replace Internet Explorer for good, or if Internet Explorer will remain part of Windows 10 for the sake of backward compatibility. We’ll have to wait until closer to release to know for sure, but we do know that Project Spartan will be the default browser in Windows 10. And from what Microsoft showed us yesterday, this new browser has the potential to be great!
For more details and if you’d like to see it in action for yourself, here is a recording of the demo on YouTube.
