Project Spartan is already among us

Project Spartan is already among us, just a few hours ago we informed you about its arrival and it is now a tangible and usable reality for everyone users who have received the latest build of Windows 10. But what really works and what doesn't work in the first and not yet final version of this browser?

Here we are going to show you our first impressions after a while exploring the new Spartan. This is not an in-depth analysis, we'll take care of that when we're testing it for a few days, but a preview with the first sensations that it has left us this browser as soon as we have started to get our hands on it.

Minimalist look

Minimalism, the great protagonist

The first thing that catches your eye is the extreme minimalism of the browser's design, with an angular and clean appearance, it shows the tabs with the open websites at the top, the address bar and, if we activate it, the favorites bar.

In the upper left part we find the options to add a page to favorites or save it in the reading list, and a button to manage both these two aspects as well as downloads and history, which are not yet are enabled. We also find the option to write, save and share notes on a website, the error report and the options.

The options

Spartan has arrived pretty bare of options and for example, although it allows us to save and manage our favourites, we still don't have any option to import them from other browsers.Also, although the reading mode correctly saves our articles, the option to read offline does not work either.

In the configuration panel we find the options to display the favorites bar, choose our home page, and activate or deactivate several elements , such as interaction symbol browsing, blocking pop-ups and cookies, Do Not Track requests, or protection against malicious sites.

Search suggestions and Cortana integration are still disabled

We will also find other options to choose the size of the font and the style of the reading view, delete activation data or predict the page that we are going to visit to load it in advance. There's also a couple of options that are still disabled, like showing search suggestions or having Cortana integrate with Project Spartan.

Finally, a very interesting aspect within the configuration panel is the highly visible presence of an add-ons section, in which we will have the option toactivate or deactivate them easilyand without entering any type of extra menu. This promises to make things much easier for us in the future, although only Adobe Flash Player is present at the moment.

Performance and first benchmarks

Our first sensations when sailing have been good, very good, and We have had no loading or fluidity problems In fact It has seemed to us that in some cases it has managed to load some websites even slightly faster than when we do it with other browsers, although it may be something logical considering that it is still quite naked.

But since these assessments are quite personal, relative and not very objective, we wanted to subject Spartan to some first benchmarksIn the first, Google's Octane, it has come off well with a score of 31042 points, higher than the 30740 that Firefox has achieved and slightly lower than Chrome's 32160.

The first results in test benches show that there is still a long way to go.

In the next two tests things change and has not had as good results In the Webmonkey Stopwatch benchmark, Spartan has loaded in 4466 milli-seconds compared to 2179 for Firefox and Chrome 3335, while in Mozilla's Kraken JavaScript Benchmark it has achieved times of 1102.6ms +/- 3.2%, when Firefox has achieved a time of 1040.6ms +/- 4.7% and Chrome a spectacular 936.4ms + /- 1.2%.

If you think we should apply a more reliable benchmark, or analyze one or another more specific aspect of the browser, we are open to all your suggestions, and we will use that data to edit this entry or for a more in-depth analysis .

In Xataka Windows | We can already try Spartan thanks to this new build of Windows 10