An IE-Based Tabbed Browser from China

wannabgeek writes "CNET reports that a new browser, Maxthon is gaining wide popularity in China. 14 percent of Chinese websurfers have used it ... Part of the reason, it has features that help in circumventing the Chinese government censors. CNET says it was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, and is slowly gaining foothold in Europe as well as the U.S."

Comments

Wait until PETA hears about *this*...

[daveschroeder]

"CNET reports that a new browser, Maxthon is gaining wide popularity in China. 14 percent of Chinese websurfers have used it ... Part of the reason, it has features that help in circumventing the Shinese government censors. CNET says it was shown at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this year, and is slowly gaining foothold in Europe as well as the U.S."

First, women slaving away making iPods. Now, they've got trained dogs doing their network censorship. This could have an impact on Shinese-American relations.

Where will it end?

Perhaps China will start using Slashdot editors to proofread the English versions of official propaganda for spelling and grammar! That's almost like trained dogs!

Re:Wait until PETA hears about *this*...

[drinkypoo]

Perhaps China will start using Slashdot editors to proofread the English versions of official propaganda for spelling and grammar! That's almost like trained dogs!

OTOH, there is a major difference; you can probably train dogs to actually catch such errors...

Re:them pesky dogs

[Devil's BSD]

I for one (as a Chinese person) welcome our new Shinese puppy overlords...

Engrish?

[thoughtlover]

"...features that help in circumventing the Shinese government censors."

Hrm. It almost sounds like one of our Engrish-reading friends submitted this story from behind the Great Firewall of Shina.

New browser?

[transwarp]

Maxthon hasn't been new for a long time. In fact, the only thing in the article I hadn't heard a million times already was that it's made by a Chinese company. And this "parallels" feature they're working on--sounds like MDI.

Re:New browser?

[kukyfrope]

I use Maxathon on my computers with tiny amounts of RAM, like my old 866mhz 128mb machine that runs WindowsXP. I've got a minimalistic install of WindowsXP on it and use it for only browsing the web. Firefox was too slow on that machine with how many tabs I like to open up, yet with Maxathon I had open 30 tabs and in task manager, it was only using about 15-20mb of RAM.

The main pitfalls of the app are it's still based on IE so the DOM Firefox support isn't there, and while Maxathon has an "AdBlock" like feature, Firefox's is cleaner and collapses the page where graphics previously were, while Maxathon keeps the ad space open and blank. And it still isn't great about handling file opening (torrent especially).

Overall it's a great little browser and on old machines I can live with its few features I wish worked differently in exchange for super low memory usage.

A new browser?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maxthon's been around for years. It used to be called MyIE.

Re:A new browser?

[m85476585]

It was actually called MyIE2, and why was that modded funny?

Shape & Color?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Browsers are very much like a car," said Jacobsson. "Most people don't care what engine is inside, (they) choose which type fits, with the right shape and color."

Yes, I use Opera because it's round & red.

Maxthon, Not New

[Webz]

Maxthon isn't all that new. Long time users know it as MyIE2.

If you've ever wondered what a browser with an IE-engine and tabs that didn't suck is like, try Maxthon. It's really lightweight.

For development purposes and sometimes just pure speed (IE feels faster than Firefox sometimes), I keep a copy on my machines alone Firefox.

Re:Maxthon, Not New

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

Mod parent oxymoronic.

And no, I'm not trolling. Most of IE's problems are due to its engine.

While it's true that third-party browsers using Trident are vulnerable to the same security flaws as IE (and, of course, share the same CSS and other rendering bugs), there are a number of flaws in IE that are corrected by third-party browsers.

Because third-party browsers don't support IE toolbars, they aren't as affected by spyware. Third-party browsers generally have search boxes, tabs, and other features that IE lack.

And, quite frankly, saying that IE "sucks" ignores the reality of the situation.

From a developer's perspective, IE "sucks" because it means that I have to bend over backwards to support IE's broken CSS implementation (although, to be honest, the CSS standard sucks in many ways anyway). But even if IE stopped "sucking" in this regard tomorrow, it wouldn't make a bit of difference to me - as a user, IE's crappy CSS support doesn't really affect me (because developers work around it), and as a developer, I'm still going to have to develop for IE6 because it will represent a significant portion of my users for years to come.

But from a user's perspective, IE isn't really that bad. From a security perspective, it's subpar, but IE has greatly improved in that regard since SP2. Users neither know nor care whether their browser has decent CSS2 support.

Re:So what, it's windows only...

[drinkypoo]

There's no linux version, unless I missed something, if that's the case, mod this down. Otherwise, does anyone have it working in wine?

You should be modded down as redundant anyway, because the title of the story begins "An IE-Based" [...] which makes it quite fucking clear that it's Windows-only, since IE/mac is gone, gone, gone.

If linux users want to run it, they can do it in vmware on a pirated copy of windows like everyone else.*

*Actually, I only run Windows 98 in my vmware right now, and I actually have a license for it... but this is a statistical anomaly.

Fun With Statistics

[TripMaster Monkey]

From TFA:

According to Maxthon research, about 14 percent of the Chinese Web population has used the browser and 17 percent employs it for Web search.

So...3 percent of the Chinese Web population employs the Maxthon browser for Web search without having used it?

USED it?

[clragon]

14 percent of Chinese websurfers have used it

have used it? I've used countless softwares in the past, but the ones that I continue to use is only a fraction of that. Just because a Chinese websurfer have used it once does not mean they thought it was a good software and continued to use it. IMO some more evidence should be provided before saying this internet browser it is "gaining wide popularity in China"

Re:So what, it's windows only...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're an idiot.

With that out of the way, Opera doesn't use any part of IE at all. Hell, it barely even uses Windows libraries, since the UI is built using Qt.

Opera uses as much IE as Firefox uses IE: practically none. (Practically because some people might consider opening downloaded files in the Windows shell to be part of IE - namely Microsoft lawyers when trying to prove that IE is a core part of Windows.)

Maxthon can use Gecko as well?

[aymanh]

It looks like Maxthon isn't entirely IE-based, its Wikipedia entry suggests that it can use the Gecko engine as well (which is the same rendering engine used by Firefox):

Maxthon (formerly MyIE2) (pronounced "max-ton") is a freeware browser. It uses Trident, the same layout engine used by Internet Explorer as its default layout engine, but can use the Gecko technology used in Mozilla Firefox as well.