Microsoft’s Project Spartan opens up to third parties to improve the platform

Adobe among the first major web entities to help Microsoft improve Project Spartan.

Microsoft's Joe Belfiore shows off Spartan for Windows 10

The top web browser software, including Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera, are built with open-source technologies, which means that virtually anyone can contribute to create a better web experience. However, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer successor, Project Spartan, is a proprietary software project that the company keeps under locking key, which makes it very difficult for third parties to bring new features to millions of users. Today things are about to change as Microsoft is announcing that it will be more flexible with third parties to improve the platform.

The software giant is now partnering with “major Web entities” to make Project Spartan a better web browser. Today, the company is announcing that Adobe is the first partnership of many more to come, and it’s letting the company to contribute new features directly for the next-generation browser.

“We’ve been making changes internally to allow other major Web entities to contribute to the growth of our platform, as well as to allow our team to give back to the Web,” — Project manager for Project Spartan at Microsoft, Bogdan Brinza, said. “Adobe improved the Web platform in other browsers, but couldn’t bring the same improvements to Microsoft’s platform. This changed a few months ago when Microsoft made it possible for the Adobe Web Platform Team to contribute to Project Spartan.”

Currently, Adobe engineers are contributing in the areas of layout, typography, graphic design and motion for Project Spartan, and a number of changes are already committed when enabling the new “Edge” rendering engine in the latest Windows 10 Technical Preview.

Although, Adobe is mostly known for making software, like Photoshop and Illustrator and for Flash Player, the company is one of the biggest contributor to the web engine open source community, like WebKit, Blink, and Gecko.

The news does not say that Microsoft is making its next web browser open source, but it’s the first thing that comes close. The news also signals that the company is committed to make the web experience better for users and developers as with more web standards, there is less coding problems and it will help to build new experiences at a rapid pace that are compatible across platforms.

Microsoft is currently working on Project Spartan and has recently confirmed that it’s looking for a suitable band name for the browser. The company is distancing from “Internet Explorer” to put an end to the bad publicity of the software and help to compete at the same level with other popular browsers.

Source Microsoft

About the author

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 14 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 20 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.