Spartan sweeps IE11 in early benchmarks

As important as the new features of Spartan are in terms of interface and functions is the new rendering engine, based on Trident, that Microsoft will include along with it. And while the browser itself is not yet available for testing in the latest public build of Windows 10, it does give you the option to use the new rendering engine within the Internet Explorer interface.

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To activate the Spartan engine we simply have to go to about:flags from the address bar of IE, and then activate the box Enable Experimental Web Platform Features.And best of all, since you can already test this new engine, the first benchmarks and tests are beginning to appear, telling us how far Microsoft has progressed with respect to Internet Explorer 11. Let&39;s see the results below."

According to the evaluations carried out by the AnandTech site, the Spartan engine would register substantial improvements with respect to IE 11 in most of the tests used to measure the speed of browsers.

The most important improvement would be in the Octane 2.0 test, developed by Google and focused on the speed of loading JavaScript code. There Spartan would register a result 81, 8% better than that of Internet Explorer 11, surpassing even the latest stable versions of Chrome and Firefox. Important advances are also shown in the Kraken 1 test.1, which also measures JavaScript performance but is built by Mozilla, and in the WebXPRT test.

Finally, Spartan shows more modest but still significant gains in the Oort Online test and in the HTML5 test. Overall, the new Trident-based engine outperforms Firefox and Chrome in 3 out of 6 tests, and lags behind in the rest. While we still don't see clear leadership of Spartan over other browsers, I think these are very encouraging results considering that the browser is only in an early stage of development.

Spartan will identify itself as Google Chrome when browsing

Another curious fact that has come to light while testing the Spartan engine is that the browser will identify itself as Google Chromewhen loading web pages. Until now, the user agent delivered by Internet Explorer 11 was as follows:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; WOW64; Trident/7.0; Touch; rv:11.0) like Gecko

While activating the Spartan rendering engine, the new id given to sites is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/39.0.2171.71 Safari/537.36 Edge/12.0

Which is almost identical to the one used by Google's browser.

The purpose of this is the same as the Internet Explorer Mobile ID change (applied in Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1): To allow sites to deliver to the browser the complete code of the web page to load, and not a limited version of it designed for older browsers, which is what happens until now with IE 11, and that causes many pages to look worse in Internet Explorer despite the fact that the Microsoft browser would be capable of displaying the same version that is displayed in Chrome or Firefox.

Via | Neowin, Windws Central