Computer Tips From A Computer Guy

Posted: 14 Aug 2009 03:51 AM PDT

Maxthon is probably one of the best free alternative browsers that you have not heard of. With Maxthon you get a lot of extra functionality on top of the basic browsing features.

Unlike Mozilla Firefox, Maxthon has the more advanced features preinstalled so you won't have to download plugins just to customize the program. Don't get me wrong though, Maxthon has its own set of plugins for you customization freaks.

At first look, Maxthon's interface is a cleanly implemented GUI. It reminds me of Safari with it's polished silver gray default theme.

It has all of the basic browsing features like tabbed browsing, ad or pop-up blocker, trusted websites browsing, multi-language support, auto-form fill, and many others. Based on the Internet Explorer engine, it is relatively fast and although some users reported instability, I haven't made mine crash so far.

The tools will shame anyone's freshly installed Firefox browser. It has a file sniffer so you can easily download FLV files or MP3 files or any files for that matter using this utility. The content control will also allow you to turn-off any unwanted content like pictures, Flash movies, Javascript, sounds and ActiveX.

It also has built in translation features and a screen capture option for screenshots of your browser window.

According to readwriteweb.com which ranked Maxthon as Top 6 of thee international products of 2008,

Maxthon is a browser created in China and reported to be the second most popular browser in China today. While it doesn’t show up as a contender in most market share reports, it has had a staggering 174 million downloads at the time of writing this post.

Using Internet Explorer’s rendering engine, Maxthon has over 1,400 add-ons, proxy switching capability, aggressive ad blocking, split-screen browsing to name a few of its innovative features.

If there is a feature in Maxthon that I particularly like that will be the mouse gestures control. With it, you can go back to the previous page by holding right click and dragging it to the left, to go forward drag the mouse to the right. Anyone can also add more mouse gestures command using it's control panel.

In my tests, Maxthon also uses less memory and CPU than Firefox, most of the time it only uses half of the memory that Firefox eats up while browsing the same page. If you are looking for an alternative browser with a power punch of built-in tools, Maxthon is a great choice!