Taking a trip on the SS Maxthon

Imagine my trepidation as I downloaded Maxthon and installed it. 99, 874,452 downloads the website proudly boasted (although I know no one except Jikon who uses it, or has even heard of it. Apparently it is very popular in China, in fact it is Chinese in origin (this being hinted at by the fact it lives on an internet explorer chassis, more about this later)). It installed simply enough and I deleted FF from my work system (although it still lives on my U3 as a guilty pleasure to be denied for the next 5 days) and clicked the seemingly innocent blue start button.

Holy fuck.

Where the hell has everything gone, why do I have buttons to open up file explorer but nothing to type addresses into. Why are the tool buttons all the way over there, and where exactly is my home page? My usual fast flowing browser using had been replaced with swearing, and confused and tentative movements of the mouse towards buttons that sort of look familiar. Where had the sidebar gone, and why cant I open all my favourite pages in one go?

However, within 5 minutes things were working ok, yes I had managed to confuse the browser into opening 47 versions of my gmail whenever I moved the mouse, but I was filled with grudging respect for it. Bear in mind that the following are first impressions only, more detailed and probably more accurate responses will come later.

As an out of the box experience, Maxthon shits all over FF. It has far better integration with things that come to FF only as addons. Mouse gestures (some at least) and this uber cool drag n search feature are there from the outset, so is a useful set of tab management functions. The Maxthon Settings Centre offers excellent, if some what confusing, control over how the browser works, and what it does automatically for you in the background. I also rather prefer the font smoothing it uses over FF, although this isnt surprising because being based on IE I suspect it has just taken it from there, the IE font control being substantially better than FF, and infact probably the best look out there of all the browsers I have tried. I suspect that Maxthon is aimed squarely at the high end user, whereas FF sits in the middle and as such is denuded of complexity unless you opt into it.

I really like the way Maxthon handles user history, its well thought out and pleasing and a lot easier to navigate through than the FF version

I am a little unsure how clean a build Maxthon is. It is, as I said, based on IE, and has exactly the same Menu bar options as IE, with extra Maxthon specific functions built in. Therefore, there remains the IE Internet Options under the Tools menu, but I am not sure if it actually needs to be there. The Maxthon settings centre does exactly the same job, and indeed when i set my homepage through the IE Internet Options windows, it didnt actually alter my homepage. Is it a residual from IE? If so, it makes Maxthon feel a little incomplete and haphazard, although it must be remembered that I am using the RC1 of Maxthon 2 here.

Initially, I miss four functions. Firstly, the mouse gestures approach in FF is much more sophisticated and offers far better functionality, albeit at the price of a steep learning curve. It allows me to control the size of text and images, as well as providing far more detailed tab and hyperlink control. I miss the in line spelling function that comes as standard in FF, I type poorly, albeit quickly, and even if i typed perfectly my spelling isn’t great. The in line speller is great. I also miss a FF plugin called Morning Coffee, that allows me to open a range of websites that I set with one click. This saves heaps of time in the morning. Finally, I miss live bookmarks. I read a range of news / music / blogs and live bookmarks offer a tidy way of collating those all. Everytime the relevant webpage is updates, the bookmarks change accordingly.

Now of course the issue at the moment is that I am trying to use Maxthon as a FF clone. I am seeking to emulate perfectly my experience, and the modalities of that experience, through another browser, which of course is perhaps a futile quest, and an innaccurate basis of comparison anyways. It is probably the case that some or indeed all of the above issues are correctable if I use Maxthon as it was intended, not as a FF copy. Instead of live bookmarks there are a range of RSS reading options out there that I could use, either as downloads or as web based apps. However, in the first couple of days of usage, its probably inevitable that this is how I try to use Maxthon. The next test will be actually altering my browser habits to ones that Maxthon can do, and then comparing which set of habits is actually better, and thus which browser is better suited to my needs. Expect another nerdy update sometime soon! (and I apologise for any spelling mistakes here, I blame Maxthon).

Jikon’s first impressions are here.