I have recently been bugged with both Opera and Firefox the two main browsers on my system because of the amount of CPU and RAM they are using and the time it’s taking to browse using them both. In fact both are leading to slowing down of my system itself and thus I found myself in the market for a new browser. My options were Maxthon and K-Meleon having used both of them in the past and hence I set out to find which one performed better and see if I could find myself a lightweight and fast browser since my current ones were failing me on a regular basis for extended browsing duties. I will review K-Meleon in another post so please check back for the same.
Coming to Maxthon, the installation is a cinch. After installation, first thing is the appearance and this is something Maxthon has improved a lot. It was too drab and with large icons previously and I ended up using skins since the default skin looked way too much like Internet Explorer’s skin previously, but now the default skin is good to look at and will not turn you off. You can check out alternate skins at http://res.maxthon.com/. Maxthon also has an option where it displays the default file menu on the right side of the browser and this is presumably so that the page/website titles are displayed better, but if you want the default file menu system you are used to like in Windows just enable show window frame in the settings and the default file menu system is back. Functionality wise Maxthon is great. It has tabs, but then so does every browser these days, but one unique feature Maxthon 2.0 onwards has on offer is a dual pane option which when enabled lets you see two tabs or more appropriately two panes at the same time. Needless to say that you can load two different websites on each pane and be able to see them both at the same time. Each pane again can have multiple tabs and work like an individual browser or browser window. The dual pane option basically halves the browser window and lets you load two different websites that you can see at the same time unlike tabbed browsing where even though you can have multiple websites open at the same time, you are still limited to viewing only one of them at a time. The only catch with this option enabled is that you get only half a browser window for a website to load in so side scrolling becomes a feature you will start using. Maxthon also features a very useful feature that of asking to restart Maxthon when you exit it so you can just enable it and shutdown Maxthon after installing a plugin or anything else of that sort and Maxthon will restart itself after shutting down. This is a feature not found in any other browser, at least I have not come across it, but if I am wrong then please do correct me.
In terms of speed Maxthon is pretty good, but not as good as Opera which has superior caching abilities, but one advantage Maxthon has over both Opera and Firefox is that it is built on the Internet Explorer engine so all websites load and work very well on it. You can say Maxthon is a clone of Internet Explorer, only better looking and more secure. Of course you will find a lot of people questioning Maxthon when it comes to security since it is built on the Internet Explorer engine and inherits all its flaws, but I have not experienced any security issues with using it and you can just go ahead and block Active X, flash, scripts etc should you wish so. Maxthon comes with Ad Hunter which will block everything from popups to ads and even filter content. This is something I have not enabled being on broadband, but this was a feature I used to use previously on Maxthon and on Firefox when I was on dialup and on 64 kbps internet connection (yeah we have that a lot in India). Other default features are mouse gestures, session restore manager, saving all open tabs in a group so they can all be opened at the same time and all the bells and whistles found in all major browsers these days.
In a nutshell, Maxthon is a great browser, and I am certainly impressed with the improvements on it and I am still discovering stuff with it since I have not used since version 1.x. One issue though is that Maxthon too has spurts of high CPU usage, which means I will definitely be giving K-Meleon a run on my system since it is claimed that it is very efficient in terms of system resources usage.
Will check it out. The dual pane view may be really useful as nowadays monitors are getting wider. Even I feel that Opera is a bit slow on loading (may be while trying to establish the last session) but Firefox I love due to its better compliance with CSS. IE can be very difficult sometimes, as I found while modifying my stylesheets.
Ajith,
Maxthon is good and gets the job done quite well. The dual pane would indeed be useful for those with wide monitors. I am also checking out K-Meleon as I mentioned in the post and it absolutely rocks in terms of speed and being lightweight in terms of system resources usage. Will do a write up on K-Meleon soon.