Maxthon: Power Browsing

I've been using the Maxthon browser for quite some time now. It was called MyIE2 in the days before and was essentially just another IE based tabbed browser. A couple of years and 32 million downloads later, it is now known for it's power browsing experience.

Out of the box, Maxthon comes with an impressive set of features including:

• Tabbed browsing
• Mouse gestures (can't live without these now)
• Super drag & drop (a feature I miss in every other browser)
• Ad & popup blocker (works very well)
• Multiple proxy support
• URL hotkeys and aliases
• Groups support (or sessions in Opera and Firefox - Maxthon did this first!)
• Amazing customizability (an enormous but well managed amount of preference options)
• RSS reader (including podcast support!)
• Plenty of skins (applied without restarting)
• 400+ plugins (it supports most IE extensions as well)
• Automatic Updates

If you don't care for the rendering engine provided by IE then Maxthon gives you the option to switch to the Gecko engine (the same rendering engine that Firefox & Mozilla use)!! Gecko support is built-in but you still need the ActiveX version of the rendering engine. Just download the "Mozilla x.x.x ActiveX Control Installer" from this site and install it. After that launch Maxthon, and in the main menu choose File->New Tab->Use Gecko Engine. Now restart Maxthon and voila, every tab now uses Mozilla's browser engine!

Maxthon downloads come in two flavours - Standard (1.9 MB) and Combo (4.3 MB). The Combo version include multiple skins, plugins and the AI Roboform form filler. One of the plugins you should download is the Easy Finder plugin. This enhances the default Find window in Maxthon which is the same as the one in IE (and which sucks). This plugin makes it as good or better than the find functionality in Firefox or Opera.

Links

• Maxthon Home Page
• Maxthon Plugins Page
• Easy Finder plugin for Maxthon
• Maxthon Quick Start Guide