Maxthon Blog

All the hoopla is over at last. Firefox 3.0 made its debut and was downloaded by millions  of users who gave it a thorough beating to see if they could make any bugs fall out.

That open source and Firefox enthusiasts found the browser on a par with the discovery of fire comes as no surprise.  What would surprise some is how often Maxthon came up in these first reviews of Firefox.  It’s as though Firefox was seen as the Maxthon beater. That’s flattering enough on its own, but even more flattering were reviews that concluded Firefox hadn’t yet beat Maxthon.

Here are some comments found on various blogs and forums:

“Have you tried Maxthon? It has sticky names for tabs and lots lots more as well. I tried [Firefox] 3 the other day but I ended up going back to Maxthon because to get anywhere near the power of Maxthon I had to install no end of plug-ins. Another problem is that some of the plug-ins don’t work yet for version 3. [Firefox] plug-ins are one of its strengths but they are also one of its weaknesses.”

Reck, DOpus Resource Centre

“I really didn’t find anything worth my while in Firefox. I honestly don’t see how it’s a better browser when the one I’m currently using is leaps and bounds ahead of it (and I’m using a version of Maxthon that was most recently updated last year). I’m sure Firefox has add-ons that can compensate for its apparent lack of features but again — an effort. My hard drive says it was nice knowing you but you have to go.

“All that this experiment has achieved is instill in me a greater appreciation of Maxthon. I’ve been using it for years and I really don’t have anything bad to say about it… and that says a lot.”

Imman, Live Journal

“I prefer using Maxthon even though I have Firefox installed.”

Nihar, Nidar’s World

“There are so many useful features in Maxthon that only a mass of manually installed plug-ins with Firefox can attempt to match. … Maxthon rocks.”

Parallel Divergence,  Nidar’s World

“What I really love about Maxthon is that it offers a whole bunch of new, innovative features than most of the web browsers out there. I was quite surprised by the fact that it does not eat up a lot of memory compared to other web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox. … Download Maxthon today!”

thomthowolf, The Old Wolf’s Curiosity Shop

 ”Actually I am using the Avant and Maxton shell that put the Firefox to shame. Incomparable better solutions. Give it a try. You’ll not be sorry.”  

Symbian-Freak

Don’t just surf the Web. Seize it!

A funny thing  happened  on James Gray’s way to write about Firefox.

He stumbled  upon Maxthon.

Gray, an editor for Linux Journal, was impressed by the growing support for Maxthon, and wound up writing a story on it. He reports that Maxthon  may have a Linux version of it coming up.

Gray interviewed Maxthon CEO Jeff Chen, who told him, “We have plans to move Maxthon to Linux. We know Linux is an open and powerful platform and we will not miss it. We have made it run on the Ubuntu system, via the help of Wine and ies4linux. We will continue to research until we can move Maxthon to Linux completely.”

Gray concluded, “If Maxthon decides to go open source, then Firefox may have quite the challenge on its hands.”

You can read the entire story here.

Dont just surf the Web. Seize it!

In  response to Gray’s  story in Linux Journal about Maxthon, one of the readers, Anonymous, challenged everyone to  open http://www.habarbadi.com/index2.htm in Maxthon and in Microsoft Internet Explorer “to see Maxthon fail to interpret standard CSS in exactly the same way as MSIE,” which I take, from the Anonymous’ tone, has become the eighth deadly sin.

Here are screen shots of that  page in Maxthon on the left and Firefox on the right.   What you can’t see are some of the roll-over effect in the Firefox version–along with most of the text on the page.  I don’t mean to  nibble on sour grapes, but the way Firefox displays the page shows a classic example of overdesign, where the designer’s showing off obscure communicating whatever the page has to say.   That Maxthon does not display the page as intended turns out to be a blessing in this case.

ys

Don’t just surf the Web. Seize it!

Huffington Post, the scrappy liberal news site, has just posted a blog by Rebecca Fannin in which she identfies Maxthon as one of the sources of “bright, young Chinese talent” that are on the verge of replacing the wizards of Silicon Valley.  The blog, China Gains Tech Trophy; Wake-up Call to the West, includes a video internew with Maxthon’s CEO, Jeff Chen:

Internet security is getting to be more trouble than it’s worth.

I use Maxthon’s Magic Fill to automate my passage into realms of sites so prosaic you have a hard time imagining why they need to check the identity of everyone asking to enter. But that’s fine.  Takes no real effort on my part.

 But for several months now many of these same sites have stated demanding to know if I’m human. That’s not as pointless at it seems at first. They are tryling to filter out spambots that troll sites to net mass quantities of email addresses on which they can unleash their pleas to help an Aftican prince bring millions into the U.S., the secret of getting my car to run on water and excited offers for colon cleansers.

To thwart probing programs, the sites display captchas, such as the one below, that has some letters that are distorted or masked, letters that no bot should be able to recognize. But if you’re human, the captcha is easy to see through.  Well, almost easy.  You know, it used to be easy, but it’s getting harder and harder to decipher captchas because tougher captchas inspired by the guerilla action from the site Captcha Killer.

At Captcha Killer you can upload a captcha, and in a few moments, the site returns the deciphtered read-out of the letters. This may seem like an elaborate way to  go about it, but for anyone who’s blind, it’s a blessing.  When it works.  At the Captcha site you’ll also find comments  from people who can’t get Captcha to do aything at all, and high praise from those for whom it  does work. It has all the appearances of a battle back and forth as the sites using Captcha develop more difficult ones for the killer to decipher, which the killer after a while overcomea routinelyand creative. Rapidshare, for example, uses a captcha, like the one here, that requires you say how many of the letters have cats behind them.  Only rarely, I’ve heard, does anyone get it right on the first try.

Another site, ThePCSpy.com, has come up with CatAuth. The site’s Oli figures computers would have a hard time distingishiung among different furry animals, but humans wouldn’t. The result is a system that has nine phones of animals, some of which are cats. Tell the site how many cats you see, and you’re in!
It’s the cat’s meow.

–MaxthonGuy
Don’t just surf the Web. Seize it!