Spartan is surprisingly fast and responsive when adblocking / tracker blocking is utilized. Interesting testing it out but I still wont use it once it goes RTM.
I'm blocking ads and trackers at the network level with my OpenWrt router setup. But as others have mentioned, Adguard can also filter Spartan as well but I believe you would have to switch the Adguard network settings to WFP network driver since Spartan is a modern/metro app. I tried with Apguard as well, particularly for element hiding, and it worked well.
I tried to check out spartan. Turns out, it's a metro app, which does not function on a machine which has uac turned off via the registry. Oh well... next...!! (and no, I'm not really interested in hearing opinions on turning uac off. I do it, and that's that).
basically its Internet Explorer 11 but running on that f**kING ENVIRONMENT, making the things go slower (thats the intention, you see its slow, you brough new hardware, its a well known m$ strategy). It give nothing new, nothing but bloat.
as I said in other post... Spartan = Metro/Modern IE (yes, the same from Windows 8.x) just with another skin and even less options, but the same s**t.
Metro IE wasn't that bad and the only problem I had with it was opening a page on full screen only on a desktop system. Agree with the 'less options' statement because I can not seem to be able to import my bookmark so that I can use it as my only browser. I hope Microsoft would forestall that in time.
Spartan is a decent Opera/Vivaldi clone. But I can't see why one should use it when Opera and Vivaldi are both way better in every aspect.
Let's not judge it yet as it is still a 'work in progress'. I doubt they are better in every respect because there are features in Spartan that don't exist in those two browser, like Cortana, annotate, etc.
Obviously it is. That's the point if one wants a good browser, not just something that opens web pages, have two choices, looking at a browser which is complete from the start like the good old (and still unmatched on a tons of aspects Opera 12) or can use a basic browser like Firefox or Chromium, and then improve it trough the extensions. For now Opera 2.x/3.x (Opium for friends) and Vivaldi have both of the above. They are good from the start and can be improved and customized (although not at the level of the common ancestor), Spartan cant be extended (yet) and has a subset of the features present on a decent browser. On the other side you can compare it with browsers meant to be just as light and fast possible with almost no additional features, like MX Nitro, and Spartan is definitely slower. So we will see, MS is used to do it's best only when has some pepper in the "back" (and the new browsers war is one of such cases), but is hard to fight against the actual competitors.
I don't know why Spartan has not received good reviews in this forum. I want to use it as the sole browser of my Technical Preview but the lack of bookmark is a turnoff.
I just found out that Google notifications preview is not supported in Spartan and it asks for modern browser to be installed.
You may have to use compatibility view (if spartan has it). I remember there was same problem with IE 11 before.
It has not received good reviews because it is a work in progress that is buggy as all hell. It should of stayed in development longer team wise before being added to Windows.