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Adios, Spartan. Hello, Microsoft Edge browser

Revealed at Microsoft Build, the new Edge browser is for consuming and creating.

Dan Ackerman Editorial Director / Computers and Gaming
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications. "Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
Expertise I've been testing and reviewing computer and gaming hardware for over 20 years, covering every console launch since the Dreamcast and every MacBook...ever. Credentials
  • Author of the award-winning, NY Times-reviewed nonfiction book The Tetris Effect; Longtime consumer technology expert for CBS Mornings
Dan Ackerman
2 min read

Watch this: Microsoft announces Microsoft Edge browser

The upcoming Project Spartan Web browser for Windows 10 now has an official name: Microsoft Edge.

At Microsoft Build, the company announced new features and details for the Web browser previously known as Project Spartan . The most notable is the browser's official name -- Spartan will now be known as Microsoft Edge, as it's on the cutting edge of what consumers and creators want to do on the Web.

One of the newest updates to the renamed browser is a new page layout for new tabs, which creates what looks and feels like a customized home page complete with links and thumbnails of the websites you visit frequently, Web-based apps you use and personalized information pulled from Cortana.

Popular extensions for the Chrome and Firefox browsers will also turn up on Edge, as these can now be repurposed for Edge with what Microsoft says are "just a few changes."

Currently, if you want to try the browser formerly known by the code-name Spartan, you need to be running the latest build of the Windows 10 Technical Preview, where its prerelease state is still a work in progress. In our hands-on preview of Project Spartan, we said, "a new rendering engine powering all of Spartan's features, and it feels appreciably zippy," but at the same time, "you'll click a link, and nothing will happen. So you'll click it again, and again, and moments later, when you've just about given up hope, several identical tabs spring to life."

The most notable features previously announced for Spartan/Edge are the inclusion of Cortana, Microsoft's virtual assistant (and like the name Spartan, a reference to the Microsoft-made Halo games), and on-screen notation via Web Note, for drawing annotations directly on Web pages and sharing them.