Microsoft is building a new web browser currently known as Spartan and it will ship with Windows 10. According to sources, Spartan will include two versions of Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine, one that handles modern websites and an older version to offer backward-compatibility for older web pages.
Although, the latest version of Windows 10 Technical Preview does not include a beta version of the new lightweight web browser, it appears that the updated browser comes with the new version of the Microsoft’s Trident rendering engine called “Edge 12”.
A new flag in the browser is letting users to switch from the current engine to the new version, which moves away from legacy support and into the modern web features in Internet Explorer.
Out of the box in Windows 10 Technical Preview (build 9879), Internet Explorer 11 controls when to use which engine. However, a new “flags” settings page lets users manually switch to the new version of Trident.
How enable “Edge 12” on Internet Explorer
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On Windows 10 build 9879, open Internet Explorer 11, and in the address bar type about:flags and press Enter. (This will get to access to the new experimental features for Internet Explorer.)
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Under the “Enable Experimental Web Platform Features” select Enabled.
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Click Apply Changes, restart IE 11 and the new rendering engine should be the default.
Before making any changes, go to What’s My User Agent to check your current user agent string and it should read: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko.
Then proceed with the instructions above, go back to What’s My User Agent and the user agent string should read: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.4) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/36.0.1985.143 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0.
What is also interesting is that for the first time we are seeing Microsoft introducing the “about” settings page, feature that we have only seen in Chrome and Firefox. But it shouldn’t be a surprise as we already know the company is aiming Spartan as a web browser that will look and work very similar to Chrome and Firefox, and it will even support extensions.
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Mauro Huculak is a Windows How-To Expert who started Pureinfotech in 2010 as an independent online publication. He has also been a Windows Central contributor for nearly a decade. Mauro has over 15 years of experience writing comprehensive guides and creating professional videos about Windows and software, including Android and Linux. Before becoming a technology writer, he was an IT administrator for seven years. In total, Mauro has over 21 years of combined experience in technology. Throughout his career, he achieved different professional certifications from Microsoft (MSCA), Cisco (CCNP), VMware (VCP), and CompTIA (A+ and Network+), and he has been recognized as a Microsoft MVP for many years. You can follow him on X (Twitter), YouTube, LinkedIn and About.me. Email him at [email protected].