The IE-based Maxthon browser released a much anticipated version 2 today. This comes just 3-months after Google invested an astounding $1 million into the browser, and that raised a lot of eyebrows because of the close relationship Google has with Firefox. I’m guessing that Google saw it as a way to gain more popularity in China since 17% of people there use it to search sites like Google and Yahoo. Why? Because users can set it up to use proxies that will bypass any filtering techniques employed by the government.
We actually took a look at Maxthon 2 starting in August 2006 (yes, it’s been in development for over a year now). There hasn’t been many new features since then, but there have been quite a few bug fixes. For those of you thinking about trying it out here’s what you’ll find in Maxthon 2:
- New Look & Optimized Layout – The default skin of Maxthon Browser has been completely redesigned and polished to provide a clear and smooth user experience.
- Fully Customizable Interface – Almost all elements of Maxthon Browser are customizable. You can create layout to fit your browsing habit and have a different look of Maxthon Browser by applying skins.
- Quick Search – Type the keywords you want to search in the address bar and press Enter, Maxthon will search them with the Default Search Engine. You can also do a search by drag & drop selected text in page.
- Mouse Gestures – Hold down right mouse button and move in different directions, you can perform a lot of common operations with it.
- Super Drag & Drop – Drag & Drop a Link to open it in new Tab. Drag & Drop to Perform a search on selected text. With key combinations, you can perform even more operations with this feature.
- Feed Reader – Maxthon Browser has integrated a powerful and easy to use Feed Reader sidebar which supports all RSS and Atom feed formats.
- Popup Blocker – Prevent unwanted popup windows to show up unless it’s triggered by your interaction.
- Content Filter – Remove Ad Images & Flash Movies from your view.
- Anti-Freeze – Maxthon has developed a new technology to prevent freezing due to AJAX while browsing websites.
- Web Sniffer – Helps you find the real URL’s of FLV video files on sites like YouTube.
- Screen Capture – Capture Full Screen, Selected Area, Selected Window and Page Content as an image. Then copy it to the clipboard or save it to a file.
Of course there are two features that disappointingly don’t seem to work. One is the tab manager which I mentioned in my early review, and the other is Aero Glass support on Vista. The tab manager is equivalent to Internet Explorer 7’s thumbnail view of all your open tabs, and the Aero Glass support is supposed to add transparency to things like the address bar (for those of you running Vista).
Another disappointing thing is that you can no longer use the Gecko engine in Maxthon, which is a feature the previous version had. In Maxthon 1.5 you could choose whether you wanted tabs to render using Gecko (the same thing Firefox uses), or have it use the IE rendering engine. The benefit of using Gecko is that sites will typically load faster, but as it turns out most people only use Maxthon because it uses IE to render sites.
Maxthon 2 Tour
Maxthon 2 Features
Maxthon 2 Homepage
Maxthon 2 Download
Not a bad browser, I test drove it for a few days and went quickly back to Firefox (as it is cross platform and doesn’t share the same vulnerability as IE does). It is pretty good all around browser and functions well for anyone who is looking use browser that isn’t too far off from IE.
Yeah, I think that if I was going to use Internet Explorer then I would probably use Maxthon or Avant Browser because they offer a lot of great features. But as you mentioned…they share a lot of the same IE vulnerabilities that never get fixed.
You say people use this browser because it uses the IE rendering engine… that’s similar to people liking cars because they can run you over. These days there are very few problems with IE, but the most glaring one remains the fact that its rendering engine is pure crap, lacking a fair bit of CSS support, lots of CSS2 support and it hasn’t heard of CSS3. If it had a decent rendering engine and extensions then I’d use it over Firefox as its faster to load and doesn’t memory leak as much. However the good rendering engine and the extensions have always been Firefox’s best feature and remain so. The idea of using a browser based on IE seems akin to running Windows ME in a virtual machine on Vista.
But the benefit of using the IE rendering engine is that every site has been tested against it. That means that almost all services will work flawlessly in it, and will sometimes even have more features than what Firefox users are able to have.
The thought of running Windows ME in a virtual machine on Vista made me cringe though.
I have used both Maxthon 1.x (Classic) and Maxthon 2.x. I will say Maxthon 1 is much closer to what you will find in Avant, as it is a true shell for Internet Explorer. However in Maxthon 2 they really reworked all the internals which for IE fans will come as quite a shock. It keeps it’s own bookmarks database completely separate from IE. I believe there is a way to synchronize between the two, but it’s very different from being able to know if you bookmark something in IE it would be in Maxthon and vice versa. I’m still trying to decide if I like the changes, but I think the speed difference probably makes it worth it, it just takes longer to get used to. One area where Maxthon is better than Firefox is you can apply skins without a restart, that feature is very nice. Other than that I will stick with Firefox for day to day browsing.
I would say that the performance improvements in Maxthon 2 outweigh any negative areas. Compared to Maxthon 1 I think it is significantly better, but it does have quite a few things that have changed.
What puzzles me is why Yahoo search engine used by default when Google has invested so much? Why should Yahoo be there in the first place?
My guess is that Yahoo’s offering them a better cut of the ad revenue than Google.