Internet Explorer’s successor, Project Spartan, is called Microsoft Edge

At its Build 2015 developer conference today, Microsoft announced Project Spartan will be called Microsoft Edge. Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of the operating systems group, announced the news on stage, adding that Edge will have support for extensions.

Edge is Microsoft’s new browser shipping on all Windows 10 devices (PCs, tablets, smartphones, and so on). Belfiore explained the name as referring to “being on the edge of consuming and creating.”

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Microsoft Edge is the successor to Internet Explorer — which will also be available on Windows 10, but for legacy use cases. However, only Edge will use Microsoft’s new rendering engine of the same name.

Edge will be the default browser for all Windows 10 devices, with a focus on giving developers a proper experience (no document modes or compatibility views) and offering consumers unique features like the ability to annotate on web pages, distraction-free reading, and Cortana integration. IE11 will be strictly for any legacy scenarios that may occur; enterprises with a large numbers of sites that rely on old technologies can choose to make it the default browser via group policy.

Developers will be able to take their Chrome extensions or Firefox add-ons and, with “just a few changes,” bring them to Microsoft Edge. Belfiore demoed a Reddit extension originally built for Chrome, running on Microsoft Edge.

Windows 10 testers have been able to play with Project Spartan for a few weeks now. The browser showed up on new Windows 10 preview builds Microsoft released for PCs in March and for phones in April.

In the next Windows 10 preview build, Microsoft will undoubtedly drop the Project Spartan name for Microsoft Edge.

Update: And here’s the apparent logo for Microsoft’s IE successor.

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New kid on the block. pic.twitter.com/7EzMjxUrFf

— Kyle Pflug (@kylealden) April 29, 2015

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There’s just something oddly familiar about it.