Maxthon Browser 4 released

Opera, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome, that's it what the Windows browser landscape currently consists of. There are a couple of other browsers, like Seamonkey, SRWare Iron or Maxthon, but even if you combine their market share you won't cross the 1% mark.

Maxthon is an interesting web browser, and I'm not only saying that because it beats Google Chrome in the HTML5test and is currently listed as the first placed browser there, but also because it is shipping with a lot of features included that may make it interesting for some Internet users.

Maxthon Browser 4 has been released today, and it seems that the browser has been renamed to Maxthon Cloud Browser with the release. The cloud addition seems appropriate when you look at the new feature set that the developers have introduced in version 4.0 of the browser:

• Cloud Push: Send text, images, websites, links and tabs from one browser to the other.
• Cloud Tabs: Sync tabs across your devices to work with the same set of tabs on all devices that run the Maxthon browser
• Cloud Download: You can download files to your cloud directly for backup purposes.

The release notes furthermore state that page loading speed and memory usage have been improved in version 4.0 of the browser.

Maxthon Cloud Browser 4.0 is available for Windows and Mac desktop operating systems, as well as Android and iPhone devices. The developers promise that Android and iPad tablet versions will be released soon as well.

To use the cloud functionality, users need to create a Maxthon Passport account which takes care of all the cloud synchronization features the browser has to offer. You can sign up with your Facebook or Twitter acount, or create a new account instead.

The browser interface looks crowded on first start, and you may need a couple of minutes to get used to all the functionality that is displayed here. You can disable the sidebar on the left and other bards that you may not want to use to reduce the clutter displayed by default.

The browser has a couple of features that I really like:

• Option to display data like the memory or cpu usage, public or local IP address right in the status bar.
• A night modus to change the standard theme of websites automatically.
• Zooming and splitting options displayed in the status bar.
• Ad and popup blocker integrated.
• Translation and screenshot feature integrated automatically.
• You can switch to Internet Explorer's engine when needed.

The browser is based on Chromium WebKit and it shows when you load websites. It is pretty fast when you open websites probably in the same region as the Chrome browser itself.

Here is a video that introduces the new Maxthon Cloud Browser:

There are a couple of things that users may not like:

• The browser once got better results in the HTML5Test as it should have received. Some called it cheating while the developers stated that it was code that should not have been integrated into the browser at that point in time.
• It is a Chinese product. While that should not disqualify it, some users may not want to run Chinese software on their systems.
• Some may find it crowded with features, too many to be precise that they never make use of. A modular approach may be more welcome.

It is up to you to give the browser a try or stick with the browser that you are currently using. I personally won't switch from Firefox due to the lack of a NoScript alternative and a couple of other issues that I experienced with the browser.

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