Microsoft's Project Spartan Internet Explorer Replacement Becomes 'Microsoft Edge'

At its ongoing Build conference, Microsoft has given us the long-awaited final name for its Project Spartan Web browser: Microsoft Edge. It's simple, and it might seem familiar: EdgeHTML is the name of the rendering engine the browser will be using. I don't think Edge has as much "zing" as Spartan does, but, it could be a lot worse.

While Microsoft Edge looks no different than Project Spartan, Microsoft has continued to do a great job of showing it off:

While the interface might look the same, there was one thing announced that I'd consider to be huge: plugins created for either Chrome or Firefox just need a few edits to drop into Edge. In an example shown, a plugin called reddit Enhancement Suite (a personal favorite) was working just fine in Edge.

Another neat feature, and possible idea for other future functionality, is a Pinterest icon that's been added to the browser, or at least this particular page. When surfing a page with a lot of images, like reddit's /r/awww, for example, you can click this Pinterest button and it will automatically fetch all of the images cached by a plugin, in this case, reddit Enhancement Suite.

At this point, it's pretty hard to grasp everything Edge might be able to do, but if developers are able to migrate their apps to it as easily as Microsoft leads on, that's a truly incredible feature of the browser - even if the plugins used standard code to begin with. That might just be what's needed to get some people to migrate on over from their current browser, especially those who've become fed-up with theirs for whatever reason.