The fact that Microsoft is working on a new web browser specifically for Windows 10 shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, but what may surprise you is that it won’t be another iteration of Internet Explorer, it’ll be an entirely new web browser. Going by the codename “Spartan”, this new web browser will reportedly be exceptionally lightweight and will function more like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox than Internet Explorer.
There’s been talk for a while that Microsoft was going to make some big changes to Internet Explorer in the Windows 10 time frame, making IE “Spartan” look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox. It turns out that what’s actually happening is Microsoft is building a new browser, codenamed Spartan, which is not IE 12 — at least according to a couple of sources of mine. Thomas Nigro, a Microsoft Student Partner lead and developer of the modern version of VLC, mentioned on Twitter earlier this month that he heard Microsoft was building a brand-new browser. Nigro said he heard talk of this during a December episode of the LiveTile podcast.