Thanks for the suggestion…

muhabbet | Yonja | Netlog

I just read this and realize the thread is almost a year old. Until today I had not heard of Maxthon so will not comment on it or FF which I have used for years. I only read the first page of posts then wrote this. I am not reading more in what is obviously religious debate. So I apologize if someone else has noticed what I am about to say and posted it already.

I have used linux for about 10 years now, and can say that for anyone experianced in it, it should not be a problem to get a simple browser for MS to work with in linux. Has no one here ever heard of WINE? It is one of the oldest emulaters in linux. (although its name claimes otherwise. "WINE In No Emulator" if I remember correctly.) It can be a pain to set up but once done will run most MS software that does not require the latest in Direct X.

There is even a company that specializes in making it work with the most popular games and they do require the latest Direct X. But it is proprietary at that point. So with a lot of talent it can be made to work with anything.

Again I can not see a simple 2d web browser being a problem.

A real informative article.

I really wish there weren't 2 major web browsers when I'm working in Dreamweaver... that kills me. It's so annoying how the pages look so much different in firefox vs. IE.

If you are using Windows you are using something inferior to begin with, and as such should just give up at life in a technological world. Moving on however : Firefox is just another browser based upon Mozilla. Seamonkey, Mozilla, Netscape, Flock, and all of the other Mozilla browsers are (for the most part) on equal footing. A feature here or there but not many differences. Maxthon, Avant, and a million more are based upon IE and as such suffer the same security flaws that plague IE, Windows Media Player, and nearly every other Mirosoft product in general. KDE, Opera and a few others are your only true alternatives that still contain the usual features that one would expect in a modern browser. If you want to complain about speed... just use Dillo and be done with it. It is faster than all of the others. You want standards compliance? Use w3m. You want the widest and best viewing? Opera or IE. You want mediocre? Mozilla (and compat.). None are the best.

You want me to trust a closed source wrapper written in China over a closed source IE7 core...The thing could have Tim Berners Lee come to my house and sing the web pages to me and I *still* wouldn't trust it. Hey all you (obviously) Chinese singing its praises, did ya read that article about how much Microsoft confers with the NSA? Do you think the Chinese Government has any desire to put it's fingers into the pie of Maxthon, who are proxying around them? Good job, now you have all the vulnerability of IE, what ever Maxthon devs want to dump in, and the Chinese AND the US Govs in your browser!!! sign me up for more of that!

"But its better than FF!"

Yeah, good luck with that, morons.

This browser will attract techie windows-only users at best outside China.

And if it ever becomes too popular, MS will kill it.

Can't we all just agree that lynx is far superior to anything else out there? Lightning fast, easy to use, low memory consumption, and it's been blocking ads perfectly for years now ;-P

I'm not a Linux-user - never tried it - but I do appreciate the pressures of being a marked-man... which the author now probably is! ;)

I have all the major browsers and none of them have endeared themselves to daily use, as Maxthon has, and does.

FF would be used daily if Maxthon were not about... probably! I say probably because I still find myself reaching first for IE over FF, which is bizarre. However, as others have said, FF - out-of-the-box - is more plain than IE, takes ages to load, does become a memory-hog but that aside; the real FF-killer (for me), is the setting-up...

... why, even scrolling needs setting-up in FF (which I've never been arsed to do).

FF, is where it is today because of its "loud" userbase. I have sat on the sidelines for around 3-4 yrs, bemused, wondering why. Sure, the geek's killer argument was always, Standards! Which is fair enough. But Joe Bloggs ain't arsed about that, and besides, The Standards issue itself spoils the user-experience if the user has to switch from FF, to IE to gain site entry.

Meanwhile, the more sedate userbase of Maxthon has quietly been enjoying all the features FF can do... but [stand braced], here's the cut; we've been enjoying a lot of these benefits for longer! That's right; another source of my bemusement has been watching how FF has seemingly adopted many of Maxthon's features over the yrs... not in all cases, but in lots nevertheless.

A brave article, the likes of which will become more frequent I suspect.

(For the record: I always have Maxthon open from my last session. Currently, that roughly translates to ~50 tabs. As I write, I have both Max 2 and Max 1.x running.

Max 2 = 17 open tabs; Max 1.x = 49 tabs.

Max 2 is using 22MB RAM
Max 1.x, 83MB RAM

The Maxthon user-agent is toggleable (if there's such a word). So stats will never be accurate.)

Of course it is interesting to know what people use to browse the web, but it isn't very important. As many have pointed out before me, the crowds seem to go for the crappiest browsers available, rather than the best. Firefox is such a textbook example. Sorry boys and girls, but it is a memory-sucking piece of crap with none of the features you SHOULD expect from a browser these days. The irony here is that Firefox supporters compare Firefox with Internet Explorer 6 which is way out of the league, and Maxthon users compare Maxthon with Firefox which also means that they're setting the bar very low.

I myself use Konqueror. Windows users would do best in downloading Opera right now. But be careful, if you like Maxthon or Firefox, Opera will blow your head away - when it comes to speed and performance Opera murders the competitors, and as for functions, Opera has got them all and more, and they have always been at the very top for more than ten years. Of course Opera is an excellent choice for Linux users too, but I'm very fond of Konqueror's amazing functions and style. Also it's open source, which nobody can deny is a huge advantage for all users in the long run.

Just thought I'd share that with you. :)

First up, you can switch Maxthon's rendering engine to gecko. You need to run a small proggy - am sure that will make all the nerds out there happy. Im sure that changes your perspective on Maxthon now.

Second, Maxthon is a VC backed venture (which need not mean much in itself). Not a stochastic coding pissathon.

Third, watch out for Maxthon 2.0. This will blow the pants off anyone not in diapers. Imagine being able to retain your browsing preferences anywhere on the internet (not just bookmarks) - oh of course its not that important is it?

Maxthon is getting increasingly more publicity. Much as .NET and Wintel is a market reality, so is IE. Numerous corporates code only to IE. But then, it is immensely important to speak in Latin or Sanskrit than to be understood isnt it?

So I'm a longtime user of maxthon/myie2 and have failed to have converted to firefox with marketing hype and ignorant followers. Comparing features against another browser feature list is pointless unless you take into account the options provided for it. Maxthon has the features but it also has them implemented properly, with the right customizations provided and that alone makes it better browser than Opera or FF for me +its fast ;)

Firefox is slow and its one of those browsers you have to trawl around looking for extensions that 1. probably should be built by default depending on what it is 2. isn't shit 3.out of date or no longer supported.

Opera can be fast, and there was a time when I looked at opera as the browser to swicth too, but then they screwed it up and noobified the interface, and the feature just don't compare to maxthon implementations plus it can be buggy.

So for me I think so long as Microsoft take the threat provided by FF and Opera seriously, then future versions of IE should improve standards support, although I think IE7 being fast and having improved web standard supported compard to IE6 is good enough for now.. but if IE8 could improve the web standards and match itself to Opera, although I laugh at things like the Acid test. So a future IE8 + Maxthon 2 with its high customization+ plugins and probably the best skinnable interface should make for some crushing times ahead. And even more so if maxthon decide to implement support for the Gekko engine although I'd much rather see them continue provide intuitive features ontop of the IE engine

Good comments one and all. The simple, unmistakable reality is that Maxthon lives or dies at the pleasure of MS. And to that end the developers of Maxthon will serve their master. This is obviously not the case with FF. At the discretion of MS, Maxthon will thrive until such time as money is flows away from MS. The calculation is trivial.

I am just laughing at your other commenters, they are so typically FF user like: spitting at others without really knowing anything.

I have been using Maxthon for 3 years now (although fully fledged with plug ins) and would and will never in a million years convert to a FF user until it could prove me that i can do something that Maxthon cant.

this said, i guess a barebone Maxthon is as useless for me as a barebone FF browser. since both have similar plugins, it would be interesting to see how FF would be in comparison, but alas i am too happy with maxthon to care about other browers.

and btw, i am from Germany *g*