Maxthon is a web browser that not many Internet users know about or mention when they are asked which web browsers they know. That’s a little bit surprising considering the 300+ mill ion downloads the download counter over at the Maxthon website is displaying. Still, Maxthon is an underdog in the browser game that is dominated by Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera and Apple at the moment.
A preview version of Maxthon 3 was released by its developers which gives an outlook of things to come. Probably the two most important changes are the change of the rendering engine from Trident to Webkit and the new design that looks similar to the latest version of the Opera browser.
You see the Maxthon 3 interface above, now take a look at how Opera 10.5 looks.
There are several similarities here; The menu button at the top left, the tabs that are placed over the address bar or a speed dial feature (called quick access page) when a new tab is opened by the user.
Key features of Maxthon 3 that are currently build into the web browser:
- Online Favorites Service: Access your Favorites content anywhere with Maxthon Online Favorites Service. The encrypted stand-alone Favorites file format can protect your privacy on a shared computer.
- Tabbed Browsing: All the web pages are arranged as tabs inside main window to ease your navigation.
- Mouse Gestures：Hold right mouse button and perform the gestures to access common features such as Back, Forward, Refresh and Close Tab.
- Super Drag&Drop: Type the keywords in Address Bar then press Enter to perform a search. Or simply drag & drop a keyword with your mouse.
- Ad Hunter: Ad Hunter can efficiently clean up the web pages by stopping Popup Windows and removing Ad Content Blocks.
- Fully Customizable: Plugins. Skins. Filter Packs. Multi-language
Maxthon 3 is provided as a alpha version currently. The developers state that the version is not feature complete and that it should not be used in productive environments.
The Maxthon 3 Download is listed in the Maxthon forum and on various software portals such as Softpedia.
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I have been using Maxthon for years and I have always liked the customizabilty. I must admit though that ever since 2.5 hit ‘the shelves’ it seems to have gone backwards. First of all the removed window frame, which was promised to return soon, but has never returned since. Second of all, even though the IE8 Trident engine is used, it seems like many things are not the same as websites often render differently.
As for the M3 Alpha: it seems like the developers keep mentioning that it’s only an alpha, so it can’t be judged yet. I have tried an earlier pre-release and it just seems like another browser which looks and acts the same as all the others, while Maxthons unique selling point has always been the customizability. From what I understood back then though, Maxthon would allow the user to choose between webkit and trident.
I think you can still switch engines.
Martin’s rigfht. You can switch engines althouigh in most cases Maxxthon 3 will recognize the type of coding used on a Web page and switch automatically between Trident and Webkit.