You need to care about Microsoft’s Project Spartan

At its Windows 10 event today, Microsoft unveiled a ton of new ideas: an 84-inch touchscreen computer, a desktop virtual assistant, and even a holographic headset. But its biggest announcement wasn’t something completely new—it revisited one of the industry’s oldest and most pervasive web browsers. The next step for Internet Explorer has arrived, and it’s going to change how every company approaches web development: meet Project Spartan.

Web developers’ days of wrestling with Internet Explorer are over.

For years, web developers have struggled to accommodate the full range of web browser capabilities, particularly with Internet Explorer. Whereas Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari typically adopted new HTML5 standards with similar thrift, Internet Explorer users were slow to upgrade, leaving millions of people running years-old software. This introduced massive development problems and, in many ways, slowed big brands’ innovation online. If a huge contingent of the target audience still runs older versions of Internet Explorer, certain features are impossible to deliver.

With more modern versions of Internet Explorer, compatibility conditions have improved, but millions of customers have been sloth to upgrade from Windows 7 to the polarizing interface changes in Windows 8. Now, with its forthcoming Windows 10, Microsoft intends to unify its product lineup and customer base around a single, modern operating system.

With Windows 10 comes Project Spartan, the rethought web browser for the web as it is in 2015. As its name suggests, Spartan features a straightforward interface that matches Microsoft’s Modern UI aesthetic, with simple white tabs and a minimalist address bar. Rumors suggest its all-new rendering engine is a version of WebKit, the same rendering engine Safari and Chrome are built on. (Like Google has done with Blink in Chrome, Microsoft might fork WebKit for a Spartan-specific experience.) This modern rendering engine promises predictable, beautiful, and responsive web experiences across platforms, and better cohesion between browsers.

A modern rendering engine means predictable web experiences across browsers.

What’s most important about Spartan is its universality: the same browser runs on every Windows 10 product, from smartphones and tablets to desktops and Xboxes. This is responsive web design extended to the browser. Rather than unique mobile-specific and desktop-specific versions, like Apple and Google develop with Safari and Chrome respectively, Spartan joins the rest of Windows 10 apps with device-agnosticism: one version for every form factor.

What’s most important about Spartan is its universality: it’s the same on smartphones, tablets, desktops, and even TVs.

Whether its implementation impacts web developers remains to be determined. But the browser’s architecture and feature set bring Microsoft and Windows into the next generation of web browsers. Windows 10 is a massive play for Microsoft, extending to every corner of its product ecosystem and bringing massive ramifications for both native and web developers targeting the world’s 1.5 billion Windows customers.

Spartan’s relationship with Internet Explorer remains a mystery, and early developer builds of Windows 10 will ship with both browsers for the time being. But as the Redmond giant marches toward complete platform cohesion, Microsoft might be the mobile industry’s unlikely frontrunner for true continuity and seamlessness between devices.