My thanks go out to my friend Keith who, probably 2-3 years ago, turned me onto Maxthon. Never heard of it? It’s the best-kept secret in the browser wars…the stealth weapon if you will.
Personally, I hate the browser wars…or any “technology religious war” for that matter. Just use what you want to use and don’t feel like you need to prove that your choice is the best…period…full-stop…point-bar (ok, I’ve run out of languages).
Having said that, I’ll fire a shot across the Firefox bow anyway. There is such a high-and-mighty attitude that people take about *you-name-it* vs. Microsoft’s offering in all sorts of software categories that I simply get annoyed.
Anyway, Maxthon is a browser that sits on top of the same rendering engine as Internet Explorer. Yes that might turn some people off and understandably so…BUT, IE does create, for better or worse, a “defacto-standard” of sorts in its page-rendering…and IE7 is way better than IE6 and hopefully standards compliance will continue…just try to not nurse those wounds so actively all you Firefox evangelists!
Because Maxthon “sits on top of” IE so to speak, sites recognize my browser as “IE” and if they are annoying about this, they’ll provide some sort of message that I’m living a substandard life because I’m using IE…how arrogant is that!? Don’t get me started…ok, don’t let me continue!
Why do I say that Maxthon is just too cool? Because it works the way I want it to work right out of the box. With Firefox, I have to suffer with a clunky interface until I search through a mountain of plugins to make it a little better. Yes, I’m a feature freak. I LOVE features. I know that there are some who do not even want to know about features that have not entered into their mind. If they desire it, they’ll look for it. That’s great, more power to you. I’m not like that. I appreciate software design that anticipates what a user might want to do and provides for it ahead of time. I see it as being a “thoughtful software designer.”
So, if you like feature-rich software that’s designed to anticipate what you think you’ll want to do. I’d highly suggest that you check out Maxthon as your browser of choice.
Once you’ve installed the basic package, you’ll have tons of features to explore. However (in ginsu-kife parlance), wait!…there’s more! Yes Virginia, there are plugins! And the reason I’m blogging this particular entry is that I’ve discovered the BlogEX plugin to make quick blogging easy in Maxthon. This is my first post with it and I’m hoping that I like what it does. So far the setup is great and the composing experience is admirable. I typically use Zoundry Raven as a full-featured blogging client and probably will continue to do so, but for the “quick post”, this may be the ticket!
What version do you recommend – classic or latest?
The latest.
Classic had some features with respect to com-object-level integration with IE plugins that were better than the latest, but it’s really caught up since then and other features are really better. For instance, from time-to-time, I use the IE developer toolbar and I think one still can’t do that with the latest version. At times like that, I just fire up IE ’cause I don’t use it THAT often.
That being said. IE7Pro (IE plugin/makeover package – free) is also a worthy consideration. Personally, I have both. I use Maxthon 99% of the time and then if I’m force to IE for whatever reason, IE7Pro makes that a MUCH BETTER browsing experience.
Now and then, I’ll suffer Firefox too…but not too often! 😉
Additionally, at school where we’re running Win 2K Pro, I can run Maxthon as well. Yes the rendering engine is IE6 (warts now and then!), but where IE7Pro is not an option because IE7 isn’t on Win 2K, Maxthon makes the experience good.
I had looked at Maxthon some 3 or so years ago before IE 7.0 came out. It seemed pretty good at the time, but not as good as Firefox was at the time especially considering it sat on top of IE 6.0 with its security issues. I will have to play around with Maxthon some although it might be pretty tough to give up Firefox as I have used it pretty much exclusively for a few years now.