Way back in September, we reported that Microsoft was working on extension support for its new browser that we later learned was going under the name of Spartan. A few weeks back, we reported that we were hearing that the new add-ons may be similar to Chrome extensions and now we have our first bit of official information about extension support.
The IE dev team took to Twitter today to answer questions about the Spartan browser and when I asked them if extensions would be supported, they responded by saying that they are "working on a plan for extensions for a future update to Project Spartan."
This is good news as many users have come to love third-party extensions for browsers as they can enhance your browsing experience. While the team is not saying much else about their strategy, we had been hearing from insiders that the plan was to support extensions that currently work with Chrome to some capacity. While we don"t know if you can run them natively, the idea is to be able to take any existing extension and quickly port it to make it work on Spartan.
This approach makes a lot of sense. Rather than having developers have to start over and build a new extension for Spartan, they can simply bring their Chrome extension over to Spartan quickly and have both browsers covered with minimal effort.
If you have any more questions about the browser, if you act quickly, the team is answering them on Twitter right now.