Probably most of you uses Internet Explorer (IE) or Firefox (FF), but ever thought about Maxthon (MyIE in the early days)?
I started using it somewhere in 2004. Back then I’ve got a portable from work which wasn’t that impressive if it came to specs.
And I’m a freak regarding opening new links in a browser, it’s my habit to open them in a new window.
So on IE this sometimes results into 7 or 8 different windows which each represents a process.
My portable back then was suffering on memory

So I started looking at alternatives and found MyIE, now Maxthon. The biggest advantage to me in this browser was “opening links in tabs” and there is no need to start another process. You can simply hold your cursor over the link and with the left mouse button clicked, move it a bit. A new tab will be opened then.

With the latest version of IE7, Microsoft finally integrated this feature also (not the easy drag drop function). I know Firefox also opens links in tabs, but I don’t know why, but I don’t like the user experience I have in FF.

As time went by I always used the ‘old’ Maxthon as default browser, but 2 months back I received another new portable at work and the first thing I did was reinstall it of-course and then open IE7 (Thx Bill), and browsed to the Maxthon homepage. I saw there was a beta release of the new Maxthon, version 2.0 out and installed this one for a change.
- A few things I’ve notice to be different is that you now also can open a link in another tab by using the middle mouse button (like in FF). But I prefer the ‘old way’
- Another improved cool thing is ‘mouse gestures’, you can assign a random task to your mouse-click+ a move. Example, rightclick and move left, goes to the previous page, ...
- The ‘Web Sniffer’ shows the real URL of movies like on YouTube, which can be very useful sometimes.
- Also the shortcut keys that can be defined are useful, you can use a single key or a selection of keys to open up a particular website for example, or add a page to your favorites, ...
- Easy proxy integration, lets you surf via your preferred proxy or import a complete proxy list

If this isn’t enough, there also addons available, and they even have a Maxthon Wiki where you can find different tips.

The only minor things I found so far where:
- The Float button, with this you can simply zoom in or out on an image. But I’ve noticed that the button is appearing on the spot you shouldn’t want it to show up, so this is already disabled in my setup.
- The screen capture ability in Maxthon 2.0, but on my portable it only results in black screens.

But to end this post on a positive note, I definitely will continue using Maxthon in the future and maybe I’ve convinced some of you by this post?

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