The new Spartan browser in Windows 10 is a major departure for Microsoft. As Simon Bisson noted in his first look of Spartan last week, the browser features both a new JavaScript engine and a new rendering pipeline, along with a sleek, fresh look. Bisson also noted, however, that Spartan fared only slightly better in HTML5 compatibility tests than IE 11 — behind Chome, Opera, Firefox, and Safari, in that order.
But that’s by no means the end of the story. To get a deeper assessment of Spartan’s innards, I turned to Steve Newcomb and Mike O’Brien of Famo.us, whose wildly innovative JavaScript framework won an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award. Newcomb, Famo.us’s CEO, told me that “the whole team is super excited about Spartan” and that he’s already considering making Spartan the browser of choice for demos.
That’s quite a turnaround after Famo.us’s long frustration with IE. O’Brien, head of platform for Famo.us, says the new Chakra JavaScript engine in Spartan “seems to just be hands down the fastest JavaScript engine out there now”.
