Maxthon has launched its first cloud browser for Linux. The release is partly in response to requests from Maxthon’s users, but also because the open-source operating system has become speedier, says Karl Mattson, the company’s vice president.

“If people haven’t taken a look at Linux for a while, they should take a second look because it’s a great product. The chorus of people emailing us asking for Linux has gotten a lot louder,” says Mattson.

He adds that Maxthon for Linux has a bigger feature set than the company usually includes in browsers when they launch for the first time on an operating system, including “Magic Fill,” an AES 256 level encrypted password and user account prompt, and mouse gestures, which lets users execute browser commands by making a gesture with their mouse.

Maxthon for Linux fits into the company’s strategy of following its users across different platforms. While its focus over the past year has been on mobile, Maxthon also recentlylaunched a new Windows desktop browser. Mattson says the company plans to continue working on new releases and content partnerships for desktop users.

Factors that may spur the adoption of Linux by enterprise users and individual consumersinclude the end of support for Windows XP, its compatibility with older hardware, and increasing ease of use.  Mattson adds that Linux is also becoming more popular in emerging markets such as Russia, which are key regions for Maxthon. The company’s browsers currently reach 100 million unique devices each month and its top four markets are China, the U.S., Russia, and India.

Future version of Maxthon for Linux will have localized features for different countries. In Russia, where Maxthon has a content partnership with Yandex, browsers are customized for major cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow. These include a taxi-calling service that geo-locates users through their browser and helps them call a car service. Other potentially important markets for Maxthon’s Linux browser include India, the U.S., China, Brazil, and Indonesia.

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Today, Maxthon, a global software company that develops state-of-the-art web browsers, today announced it is expanding its partnership with Yandex, Russia’s dominant search and web services provider. In a new agreement, Maxthon and Yandex will work together to offer Maxthon web browsers to Russian desktop and mobile users pre-loaded with several of Yandex’s top web services.

The collaboration builds on Maxthon’s already-strong growth in Russia in both mobile and desktop browser activations and is in line with Maxthon’s ‘global/local’ strategy of offering high performance web browsers optimized with local services and content, all linked through Maxthon’s seamless ‘Cloud Browser.’

“We’re excited to be offering these services to Maxthon customers in Russia,” said Jeff Chen, CEO and founder of Maxthon. “Our original partnership with Yandex offered our customers Russia’s superior search experience. Adding Yandex services threaded through Maxthon’s multi-platform browsing doubles down on that already-strong value.”

Maxthon will be pre-loading access to a number of Yandex services including:

• Yandex.Safe Browsing: The most comprehensive and current safe site database covering the Russian internet.
• Yandex.Mail: One of Russia’s most popular webmail services offering its users unlimited mail storage, anti-virus protection, advanced spam filtering and much more.
• Yandex.Market: Russia’s leading online comparison shopping system, with more than 53,000,000 product offers in more than 14,000 online stores available to customers in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan and Turkey.
• Yandex.Maps: Online mapping service providing high-quality, detailed maps of more than 1,300 cities and towns inRussia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Belarus, together with satellite images and hybrid maps, panoramic street views and driving directions, for desktop and mobile users.
• Yandex.Taxi: A safe, reliable and affordable taxi ordering service with traffic-based routing, available on desktop and mobile devices in Russia’s largest cities.

“Russia is a tremendously dynamic internet market that is a key part of our global growth strategy,” said Karl Mattson, VP of Maxthon’s International Division. “In particular, there’s a split between urban and provincial internet penetration and internet activity. Adding Yandex services complements both.”

Download Maxthon for Windows: www.maxthon.com

Download Maxthon for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mx.browser

Download Maxthon for iPhone / iPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/maxthon-web-browser-best-out/id541052011?mt=8

Download Maxthon for Windows phone: http://www.windowsphone.com/en-us/store/app/maxthon/7930f298-bd1e-462c-bbf2-0e36f26d04d4

About Maxthon

Maxthon is an innovative software company that develops superior web browsers that continue to set new standards for speed, security, simplicity and cloud features. It is available on the Windows, Android, iOS and Mac platforms. With offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Beijing, Shanghai and Hong Kong, Maxthon reaches a global community of users that tops more than 120,000,000 people each month in more than 150 countries. Click here for more information about Maxthon

There was a time in my life when I heard great things about Maxthon (formerly known as MyIE2), back when it was based on the Internet Explorer web browser from Microsoft and only available for the Windows operating system. I never had the pleasure to work with it until today, when I’ve installed the new development version under my Arch Linux box.

These days, the popular Chinese web browser is called Maxthon Cloud Browser and it is based on the open source Chromium web browser, supports all the extensions from the Google Chrome Store, and it provides a unified user interface across all supported platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, Mac, and Windows Phone.

Maxthon Cloud Browser for Linux is not yet an official release, as it’s still in development, and it resides on the official Maxthon forums for the moment, where users can grab the latest Beta versions. It’s easily installable on Debian, Red Hat and other Linux operating systems, especially Arch Linux users, as a package is already available in AUR.

Even if, at first sight, it looks promising and attractive, you will immediately notice that it’s actually a modified version of the Google Chrome/Chromium web browsers. It brings some welcomed additions, but unfortunately it also includes all the bad things that Chromium or Google Chrome has, and I say this as a full-time Mozilla Firefox user.
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Maxthon Cloud Browser puts tight integration with multiple devices at the heart of its feature list. It also offers a number of utility and convenience features to enhance normal day-to-day Web use.

The free Maxthon Passport account is how syncing and integration is handled. Setting it up is trivial—put in a name and a password, and reply to a configuration email. Once I did this, I was able to install the Maxthon browser on my iPad and import my bookmarks and open tabs.

However, this review is primarily about the PC version of the browser. Maxthon Cloud browser uses two rendering engines, Trident and Webkit, to handle both newer and older pages optimally. Speed is good, even on image-heavy pages.

Maxthon Cloud Browser has several built-in features that provide helpful utilities or enhancements. One such is “Reader Mode”, which can (on some pages—the option does not appear on every page) figure out what the main article you’re trying to read is, and then display it without ads, pop-ups, and other distractions. Another is the screen capture feature, which will take a shot of either the whole page (including that scrolled offscreen), or a selected region.

A new feature in Maxthon Cloud Browser is multiple sessions. This allows a user to log in to the same site with different IDs, which is helpful if you maintain multiple accounts for various purposes. As with most modern browsers, Maxthon also has a private mode.

On the negative side, I spent some time trying to get Flash to load and run properly. Even after searching the forums and trying multiple suggested solutions, it was not working. Eventually, I did get it to work, but only by uninstalling the browser and reinstalling it in the suggested default directory. Even though the installer program offers a choice of target directory, the altered path was not propagated through the configuration. The company stated that a fix is in the works and will be addressed in a stable release by mid-February.

In general, documentation is sparse; the forums provide the main venue through which information about features and functionality can be gained.

Maxthon has a built-in ad blocker, but it works very sporadically as compared to the AdBlock plugin and similar tools. There is a fairly large selection of plugins and extensions available for Maxthon Cloud Browser, but many are not available in English language versions (so I couldn’t evaluate them), or are of limited functionality.

As is often the case with browsers beyond the top three or four, while Maxthon Cloud Browser has no glaring flaws and does a perfectly functional job of doing “browser things,” it’s hard to find something significantly unique/superior to the existing major browsers to make me switch to it for my day-to-day use on a PC. As with Opera 18, those who regularly move across platforms and need their environment preserved as they move from machine to machine may find it much more appealing.

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