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Today, the first beta version of Maxthon 5, nicknamed MX5, has been officially launched. This release shows Maxthon’s commitment to following through with its evolution from a classic browser to a full personal assistant for all your online activities.

The change started with version 4, also called the Maxthon Cloud Browser, when it gained the ability to sync data in the cloud, a cloud-based file sharing systems, and a personal assistant for saving and syncing notes in the cloud.

MX5 follows in its footsteps, and Maxthon International, the Chinese company behind this browser, is sticking to its plan to cram as many features as possible inside its browser at a time when browsers like Firefox are striving to cut down all unnecessary features.

This is not necessarily a bad path since Vivaldi is doing the same thing, and many users seem to like its approach of crowding the browser with all sorts of features and controls.

MX5 gets a revamped bookmarking system

For its part, MX5 comes with three main features, namely Infobox, Passkeeper, and UUMail.

The first, Infobox, is a rethinking of the old bookmarking system, which allows users to save not only a website’s URL but also its content in specially designed “cards.”

Users can decide what and how much to save from each site, which can come quite in handy if you’re interested in a few paragraphs and two images and don’t want to search the entire page just for the two.

Infobox is also a full information center, and it combines the note-taking and cloud storage features, which were introduced in version 4.

Maxthon 5 Beta also gets a password manager

The second major feature, called Passkeeper, is what you think it is, a password manager. Some might not like that Passkeeper stores its data in Maxthon’s cloud, but the utility comes with the ability to generate strong random passwords to secure your accounts, and triple encryption and multi-channel security using the AES25 algorithm, used to secure the local password store and the password sync operations to the Maxthon’s cloud.

The third feature, UUMail, is a virtual email inbox. Users can create multiple UUMail virtual mailboxes and pass them around to their friends, work colleagues, and spam bots.

The user can redirect these virtual inboxes to real email addresses, depending on the content they expect to receive on each. Opinions on this feature are split since if you take the time to create four different email addresses to manage different types of emails, adding a virtual email inbox on top seems just like a waste of time.

Nevertheless, people end up using these features in all sorts of ways, and there are many other cool features that Maxthon brings to the table if you decide to use it as your default browser.

Maxthon 5 Beta is available for download from Maxthon’s official website or from Softpedia’s download mirrors. Only Windows users are spoiled for now.

 

(Original Post by Catalin Cimpanu: http://news.softpedia.com/news/first-beta-of-maxthon-5-shows-browser-evolution-to-personal-assistant-507093.shtml)