You can try Internet Explorer's replacement in the latest Windows 10 build
New Windows 10 preview build includes Project Spartan
The reading view that trims out ads and extraneous information on the page is there, and you can save those pages to a reading list read later (as images or PDFs) as long as you're online. In later builds you'll be able to read those offline – and you'll be able to sync them to other devices where you sign in with the same Microsoft account, and read them offline there too. In this build, you won't even be able to see the tabs you have open on those other devices, even though you can do that in IE today.
OneNote and OneDrive, together as One
There's an early version of OneNote-based annotation in this build of Project Spartan. Tap on the annotate icon and you can type, write or draw on the page and send that to a friend (by email or a social network like Twitter). What they get is a 'Web Note' attachment that they can open in any browser; it's a screengrab with your annotations rather than a live web page, because the page might have changed by the time they visit it. Your Web notes get saved in your reading list; again, in this build that's only on the PC where you create them and you can only see them when you're online, but in later builds they'll get saved to your OneDrive cloud storage and synced to your other devices and you'll be able to look back at them when you're offline. If you want to have them sync now, you'll have to specifically save them into OneNote.
At this point, the only plugin in Spartan is Flash (just like the touch IE browser in Windows 8 and 8.1); we expect that to stay the only plugin, unless Microsoft customers give them lots of feedback about needing, say, Silverlight. Microsoft has said there will be an extensibility model for Spartan, and it sounds as if it will be more like extensions in Chrome and Firefox than ActiveX, but that's not ready yet (and we don't expect to hear about it before the Build conference).
Like Windows 10 itself, Project Spartan is far from finished (the latest Windows build has bugs like mail indexing not working). But this is the first chance to see what Microsoft thinks the future of web browsing looks like.
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Mary (Twitter, Google+, website) started her career at Future Publishing, saw the AOL meltdown first hand the first time around when she ran the AOL UK computing channel, and she's been a freelance tech writer for over a decade. She's used every version of Windows and Office released, and every smartphone too, but she's still looking for the perfect tablet. Yes, she really does have USB earrings.
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