At the ongoing BUILD conference, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) shared more details of its upcoming Project Spartan web browser.
The first major announcement at BUILD was a change in name for the browser. Going forward the project will now be known as Edge. Edge is also the name of the rendering engine that will be working behind the scenes, so the change in name makes sense.
The next big announcement is that plugins written for Firefox or Chome will also be compatible for Edge. This comes as Microsoft announces that apps written for Android and iOS will also be compatible with Windows 10. On stage, Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore said that the Reddit Enhancement Suite, a plugin that works for all browsers but Internet Explorer was ported over to Edge with minimal work.
Internet Explorer lost a lot of ground to Firefox and Chrome during the past give years. IE 10 did a lot to reverse these trends, but Microsoft still has a long way to go to win back this market share. Project Edge is a step in the right direction, and if it works out Microsoft can begin to rebuild the brand.
Microsoft’s BUILD conference is ongoing, and there will no doubt be more announcements to come as it continues.
