Enable the Spartan Browser’s Speedy New Edge Engine in Windows 10

Called Project Spartan during a demonstration Windows 10 event, the new browser was shown running on a PC, although it will also be available for mobile devices. The name is an important point, because it may signal that IE 12 may continue to appear in Windows 10 as a separate, alternate browser.

Project Spartan also features integration with the Cortana voice-activated digital assistant. And based on its growing knowledge of each user, Cortana will also get activated in more nuanced scenarios. And also, the very latest builds of the Spartan browser may not ship with the next builds of Windows 10 for developers, although it should be easy for testers to utilize the revised Action Center.

So Microsoft’s new Project Spartan browser (above image) isn’t available just yet, but Windows Insiders can already reap some of the benefits through Internet Explorer. And in the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview build, users can toggle a hidden flag in Internet Explorer to enable Spartan’s new Edge rendering engine. Though it’s still experimental and is mainly aimed at developers and it should bring significant performance improvements over IE11’s existing engine.

To enable the new engine,

• Simply enter “about: flags” in IE11’s address bar.
• Select “Enabled” under “Enable Experimental Web Platform Features”.
• And then restart the browser.
• Next, enabling the “Custom User Agent” option will trick sites that nerf IE specifically into using the Spartan Edge rendering engine.

The Benchmarks by AnandTech show better scores for Edge in all major benchmarks compared to the old IE engine. Edge also outperforms Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox in a couple of tests "Sunspider and Octane", though it still lags behind in others like "Kraken, WebXPRT, Oort Online and HTML5Test".

Also, in addition to the performance improvements, Project Spartan will bring new features such as webpage annotation, Cortana integration, a built-in offline reading mode, and the ability to save page clippings to OneNote. It also has a slick new look, with a tabs-on-top layout similar to other browsers. The new browser should show up in a future Windows 10 preview build, but the timing is unclear.

And why this matters?

Speed improvements alone won’t revitalize Microsoft’s browser efforts; however the other improvements won’t matter as much if Spartan feels sluggish next to the competition. The new engine helps pave the way for a more modern browser from Microsoft, and is worth checking out if you’ve already gone through the trouble to set up the Windows 10 preview.