The Maxthon 2 Experiment
Jun 21 2008 Sat
5:30 am PHT
My friend Imman got irritated with many of his friends praising the arrival of Firefox 3 so he decided to try the darned thing to see for himself what the hype is all about. He is already using Maxthon, a powerful tabbed-browsing shell to the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Read his assessment where he disses Firefox 3 out-of-the-box. He understands that Firefox can be extended in functionality but he prefers a powerful default browser (e.g., Maxthon has mouse gestures by default). And just like Firefox, Maxthon has a mature add-on community to further make Maxthon more powerful.
Well, I decided to do a playful jest in return and to try Maxthon 2, but not the Maxthon Classic he is using, so as to up the ante. And to further raise the bar, I’m gonna look at the default Firefox 2 features (not Firefox 3) that I’ve come to rely on and see if Maxthon has these by default. (Note I’m using IE6.)
Find in page. To quickly look for something on a page in Firefox, I simply press the slash key (/) then type away my search words. (This behavior was adapted for Firefox from the Unix program vi.) And when I want to search for the next occurrence, I just press F3, and then Shift-F3 to search backwards. In Maxthon, to bring up the search in page feature, you either type in the search bar then select the find in page feature (or click the highlight button to highlight all the occurrences, which is pretty cool) or press Ctrl-F, then type away. But, there’s no keyboard shortcut to find the next/previous occurrence!
Session recovery. Firefox has crashed a few times on me, sometimes in the middle of typing a blog post, but fortunately, when I reopen the Firefox, all of my previous tabs including the text that I have typed in web pages reappear magically. This has saved me a lot of times! (This worked even when the computer went out because of a power interruption.) I simulated the same in Maxthon (by aborting the Maxthon.exe process in Windows Task Manager) and didn’t get the same behavior. Sure, Maxthon was able to remember what tabs were opened last but all of the text I typed were gone!
Spell-checking. What? Maxthon doesn’t do inline spell-checking? That’s so 2005!
View source. I use this feature quite a lot to copy HTML code between pages. But Maxthon, being an IE shell, uses the default view source behavior of opening Notepad. Boo! Firefox, on the other hand, shows beautiful syntax-highlighted source code. I also would like to note that Maxthon does have the view selection source feature (wherein you select part of a web page and only get the HTML source for that part) but it does a stupid job of mangling the context HTML.
Feed subscription. Maxthon has a built-in feed reader, but I prefer using Google Reader (and Bloglines before). Firefox is able to detect feeds in web pages using auto-discovery and I use this to do two-click subscriptions to blogs to any web feed reader I want (and this can be a one-click operation if you prefer). Maxthon has no such functionality for external or web-based feed readers and it forces you to use the built-in one. Bad move.
DOM Inspector and Javascript Console. Where are these in Maxthon? Oh right, IE. Pfft. Even if I don’t install any web developer plug-ins for Firefox 2 such as Firebug, I still have these really powerful web developer features by default (well, an option during installation) in Firefox 2.
I could go on and on, but these points should suffice for now.
Did I mention that Maxthon uses the IE rendering engine? Who would want to use that when Gecko (Firefox), Webkit (Apple Safari), and Opera render pages so much better (IE7 notwithstanding)? In addition, Firefox is cross-platform so I can expect the same default experience even if I’m browsing on a friend’s ASUS Eee PC or MacBook, or if I’m using my Linux workstation at the office.
So no thanks, Maxthon. My hard drive says it was nice knowing you, but you have to go. All that this experiment has achieved is to instill in me a greater appreciation of Firefox. I’ve been using it for years and, while I can say bad things about it, I’ve seen that Firefox still blows the competition out of the water.
P.S. I am not trying to convince Imman to switch. I know for a fact that getting accustomed to a piece of software takes time and it’ll be really hard to adjust to something new. Imman is quite contented with Maxthon and I recognize that. This post is simply a way to show that the dissing can go the other way too. Hehehe.
Comments
Comment times are in Philippine time (+0800).
1
On 5:51 a.m., 21 Jun 2008, Jeff wrote:
I didn’t even know about the Quick Find feature until now (LOL). Good one!
2
On 8:14 a.m., 21 Jun 2008, jorel wrote:
Makes me wonder if I should also do a write-up extolling the features of Opera?
On second thoughts, too lazy to write…
3
On 8:18 a.m., 21 Jun 2008, jomer wrote:
Hahaha! That showed him
I actually didn’t know some of the stuff you wrote. Rawr.
4
On 8:21 a.m., 21 Jun 2008, joyjoy wrote:
want to try this on my safari? hehehe am not sure if i have the latest version available, since my OS got demoted back to tiger from leopard after my HD crashed.
5
On 4:21 p.m., 21 Jun 2008, Ron White wrote:
Hi, Eugene….
I think your idea of the Maxthon 2 Experiment is really neat. But you missed a few things I’d like to correct for the record.
Find in page: You said “theres no keyboard shortcut to find the next/previous occurrence” of a word. Actually there is. The down key finds the next occurrence and the up key finds the previous occurrence. I think those keys are more intuitive and easier to use because no shifting is involved compared to F3 and Shift+F3. And I think it’s worth mentioning that in Maxthon, when you do a Find in Page, there are options for counting the number of occurrences, that you find only whole words or multi words, all features I couldn’t find in Foxfire 3. (I’ll be honest and tell you I haven’t figured out what “multi words” means. I’m sure it’s very helpful for someone.)
Feed Subscriptions. I’m not a big user of feeds, and so I’m not the best person to discuss the fact you prefer Google reader to the one built into Maxthon. I do know that a plug-in enables Google Reader in Maxthon, and that, like Firefox, Maxthon automatically detects whenever a page has a feed. (It also detects and identifies the sources of any videos and animations.)
DOM Inspector and Javascript Console. I don’t know and I don’t care. I feel the same about whatever niceties distinguish rendering in Trident and Greko.
I do know that my daily browsing with Maxthon is enriched by several features that I don’t believe are in Firefox. I like Maxthon’s split screen so I can see two pages at once. I treasure the ability to “tear off” a tab and move its page to a second screen. I don’t see how anyone can do serious research on the Internet without Maxthon’s ability to save several tabs as a group, to do ad hoc translations of a dozen languages, and to take screen captures. I like to have some tabs refresh automatically. The ability to edit a page to get rid of ads and other distractions before you print it is terrific. The powerful proxy feature is handy when you’re feeling sneaky. Automatic filling in of passwords and user IDs is a wonderful luxury. When I exit Maxthon, it gives me a choice for reopening of displaying a list of the tabs that were displayed with I quit so I can pick and chose, opening those pages automatically, going to my home page, or displaying only a blank page. Firefox offers only to redisplay all the open pages when you return.
Now I realize Firefox may have some of these features among its plug-ins. But I tried to stick to features in Maxthon that are available without resorting to plug-ins and extensions. I could have missed some. But you know how that goes.
Ron White Maxthon Advocate
6
On 4:29 p.m., 21 Jun 2008, imman wrote:
@jomer: that showed me… what?
i’m not seeing anything that will still make me want to switch to FF. the features enumerated above are all nice and such but if i have never needed a spell checker in my browser, i dont use feeds and the other features listed above are luxuries i can do without.
so yes, i still fail to see the point of what “this showed him”.
7
On 4:32 p.m., 21 Jun 2008, Ron White wrote:
Oh, I forgot. Maxthon does have spell checking. Put your arrow in some text you’ve written and click the right key.
ron
8
On 8:39 p.m., 21 Jun 2008, seav wrote:
@Jeff, you’re welcome!
@Jorel, oh, you have a blog? Hehehe.
@Jomer, be nice.
@Joy, I have Safari for Windows and it sucks. I’m sure it’s better in OSX.
@Imman, away na. I’ll just reiterate that I won’t try to convince you. Maxthon is good for you and that’s all that matters.
9
On 8:54 p.m., 21 Jun 2008, seav wrote:
@Ron, thanks for all the clarifications! Now that you’ve clarified the Find in Page feature, I now agree that Maxthon matches or even exceeds Firefox in that respect.
The reason I prefer Google Reader is because it’s web-based; I can read my feeds using whatever AJAX-enabled browser that’s at hand. If I use Maxthon, I’d have to have Maxthon at all the places where I browse. Maxthon should’ve had the option to let you choose your own feed reader at the very least.
You’re right that the functionality that you’re liking in Maxthon that’s there by default can be added to Firefox using various extensions. I guess you find value that they’re there by default in Maxthon, but I prefer a less-featured extensible browser so that I can really customize my browsing experience.
You said that Maxthon has “automatic filling in of passwords and user IDs.” Firefox has had this feature as well since version 1, IIRC. And you said that “Firefox offers only to redisplay all the open pages when you return.” I don’t find a problem with this, really. I actually prefer not getting that choice since I can pretty much open a blank tab or the home page easily when I reopen the browser.
And I didn’t notice the spell checking feature before. Then again, it’s still not inline spell checking, unlike in Firefox where it underlines misspelled words using a subtle red border right there in the textbox. This feature is my most favorite of all the new features when I installed Firefox 2.
10
On 10:05 p.m., 21 Jun 2008, imman wrote:
@seav: hindi naman ako nangaaway. we’re discussing the merits and demerits of both maxthon and FF and it would only be appropriate if the discussion revolved around said issue instead of comments like “That showed him” which is utterly vague, non-constructive, personal, and does not contribute to people’s awareness or knowledge of either software.
i wrote the entry in my blog just to make people aware that the choice isn’t just between IE as a browsing application and FF. a lot of people aren’t probably aware that maxthon exists and this was just my way of saying “hey, you don’t necessarily have to go the FF way if you hate IE as a browser.”
it’s just extremely annoying when you’re just trying to educate people by illustrating another alternative and then you get attacked personally. parang hindi nag-philo 1 amp.
11
On 12:04 p.m., 22 Jun 2008, jomer wrote:
@imman: LOL. I WAS KIDDING. I thought you knew me better tsk tsk. I was just trying to humorously reply to a humorous post.
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